[Blood Bowl 03] - Death Match

by Matt Forbeck - (ebook by Undead)

  “I have heard that the commercials during the final match can go for a million crowns a minute,” said Guillermo.

  “Too true, Mr. Reyes,” said Pegleg. “Now stretch your imagination if you will and think about what would happen to Wolf Sports if Murdark had to refund all that money because no one ever saw the commercials.”

  Everyone fell silent for a moment. Then Edgar started to giggle, a low and hollow sound that tickled the ears. Slick joined in soon after, and then Dirk, Dunk, Guillermo, and even Cavre. The laughter grew from snickers, through guffaws, to full-blown belly laughs. In the end, even Pegleg had cracked a wry smile.

  “We don’t need to worry about that, though,” Cavre said. “We just need to play the best we can, no matter who is watching.”

  “Well said, Mr. Cavre,” said Pegleg. “However, I have it on good authority that Murdark is paying a fortune to have every camra in the Emperors Stadium replaced and reinforced so that no magic — however strong — can damage them or interrupt their signals.”

  Slick let out a low whistle. “That’ll cost him a small fortune.”

  “He’ll make it up with the ads, Mr. Fullbelly. Word is that he’s getting premium rates for this game. After all, it’s a grudge match.”

  Dunk frowned. “A grudge match?” He glanced at the other players, each of whom seemed just as mystified as he — except Cavre, of course, who always seemed to know what the coach was talking about. “I don’t think any of us like the All-Stars, coach, but they’re no worse than any other rival team.”

  “Oh, really, Mr. Hoffnung?” Pegleg said. “I would have thought you’d have been able to understand the spin on this game better than anyone.”

  Dunk narrowed his eyes at the coach. “Why?”

  “Who is the most renowned team wizard the All-Stars have ever fielded?”

  “Didn’t Olsen Merlin help them out for a year about fifty seasons back?” asked Slick.

  Pegleg moved to backhand the halfling with his hook, but Slick slinked behind Edgar’s trunk before the ex-pirate could land the blow. “You always remind me of a saying, Mr. Fullbelly,” Pegleg growled.

  “Which is?”

  “Agents aren’t necessary, just evil.”

  Slick turned red, but managed to say, “So, Zauberer’s back working for the All-Stars, is he?”

  Dunk gasped. He’d wondered when the wizard might finally show his hand. Now, during the championship game of the Blood Bowl Tournament, seemed like as good a time as any. Dunk wondered how he could ever defeat Zauberer now that the man had his wormy hands on the Chaos Cup. Any wizard who could incinerate anyone who tried to hurt Dunk could flash-fry him in an instant too. Still, there had to be a way. At least during the game, he might finally have a chance to try to take the wizard out and put an end to the hated Hoffnung Curse.

  The nasty snarl on Pegleg’s face faded to a simple frown. “That he is, Mr. Fullbelly.” He gave Dunk a sympathetic look. “We’ll do everything in our power — such as it is — to help you take him out. We can assume that his edict against killing you is only in effect until the game begins. After that, all bets are off.”

  “Now who would be so heartless as to say something like that?” said Gunther the Gobbo as he shouldered his way close to the table.

  Dunk’s eyes grew wide. “What are you doing here?” he asked as he leaned over and whispered at the bookie. “I thought we agreed you couldn’t be seen with us.”

  “Leave now?” Gunther said a bit too loudly. “But you guys are my favourite team — unless you lose, of course. The odds are already three to one against you.”

  “Against us?” Dirk asked. Dunk felt ill.

  “Of course. The All-Stars were the heavy favourites beforehand, but when someone leaked their roster for the championship game…” Gunther winked at Dunk. “Well, now everyone knows you’re going to get your ashes handed to you — or to your next of kin, at least!”

  “Has he…?” Dunk asked Pegleg.

  “He’s been quite helpful so far, Mr. Hoffnung.”

  “It doesn’t hurt that I’ve made a mint so far at it.”

  “How’s that?” asked Dirk, ever suspicious of the Gobbo.

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this business,” said Gunther, “it’s that you never bet against your team. I’ve been betting with the Hackers since just after the Dungeonbowl, and it’s been easy money.” The Gobbo leered. “Of course, starting a rumour that Zauberer’s been known to miss his targets with those lightning bolts from time to time helped out with putting the odds more in my favour too.” As an aside, he whispered to Dunk. “Not true. Don’t believe it.”

  “Should you really be seen in our presence?” Guillermo asked. “At least out in such a public place?”

  Gunther snorted, and then replied with a fake grin pasted on his face. “Kid, I’m the most notorious odds maker in town. The two teams that’ll compete in the Blood Bowl championship game just got announced. If I don’t track you guys down and chat with you, that’s going to look suspicious. So just shut your trap and try to tolerate my company for a few more minutes so we can make this look good.”

  “Have you been doing anything to help, other than just lining your pockets?” Dunk asked.

  Gunther shook a finger at Dunk. “See, now that’s the kind of question I can respect: full of the suspicion and the derision I’ve earned. Well done, kid!”

  “Have you?”

  “It’s just that kind of doggedness that’s going to lead the Hackers to victory in the championship game. Go Hackers!”

  Gunther raised his arm to lead a cheer in which no one else joined. “Give me an H!”

  Silence.

  “Go to hell,” said Guillermo.

  “There’s an H! Give me an A!”

  Dunk leaned towards the bookie. “Answer my question.”

  “Hey,” said Gunther. “I got you that match against the Titans, didn’t I?”

  The eyes of the Hackers turned towards Pegleg.

  “Aye,” the coach said, “that he did.”

  “And how about how I brought Dunk’s old flame here tonight, to help him celebrate?”

  Dunk’s heart went cold. “You did what?”

  “Well,” Gunther said, wincing. “She’s been after me for a while to tell her where you are, but I wouldn’t say a word! I absolutely refused to let her know where the Hackers are staying during the tournament. She gave me a few notes to pass on to you, but I refused those too. I didn’t want her to bother you. I was protecting you.”

  “But now that Dunk’s in the championship, you think it’s all right to shake him up a bit?” asked Dirk. He’d ended up on the other side of Gunther from Dunk, and the bookie now stood sandwiched between them.

  “Well,” Gunther said, “with Schönheit gone and Zauberer on the loose still, I… Well, I figured…”

  “If I’m facing certain death I might as well get this out of the way?” Dunk said.

  Gunther grimaced. “I’d have put it better than that, of course, given a bit more time, but sure, that’s the gist of it. Thanks, kid!”

  Dunk glanced around the room, peering over the shoulders of his team-mates. “Where is she?” he asked.

  Gunther’s face lit up. “I figured you two lovebirds would want a little privacy, so I arranged for a sheltered booth in the third room back.”

  “I left her, Gunther.”

  “Is this Helgreta?” Dirk asked. He glared at the Gobbo. “This is Helgreta Brecher, isn’t it?”

  Gunther nodded as if his neck had been replaced with a loose spring.

  “I thought she tossed you out on your chin,” Dirk said to Dunk.

  “That’s the official story,” Dunk said. “That’s what the Brechers told everyone. I never saw her after that… incident during our engagement party.”

  “So you call fleeing town with an angry mob of daemon-hunters on your tail ‘leaving her’?”

  “She wrote me letters,” Dunk said. “They found me somehow.
She said she wanted me back. No matter what people said about Father, she knew I was innocent. She still wanted to go through with the marriage.”

  “Daemons, weddings,” Slick said. “All the reasons I left my little halfling home in the Moot far behind.”

  “And still she wishes to speak with you?” Guillermo asked, astonished.

  “Amazes me too,” said Gunther. “I don’t know what you’ve got in that codpiece, kid, but I’d be careful with it if it inspires that kind of loyalty.”

  Dunk fought the urge to smack Gunther across the room. “Where did you say she is?”

  “Back booth, third room back.”

  Dunk stood up and noticed that everyone at the table was watching him. “If I’m not back in five minutes, send a search party for me.”

  “If you’re not dead within the first minute, you may need longer than that,” said Cavre.

  Dunk nodded. “Make it twenty.”

  With that, Dunk turned and walked towards the open doorway in the back of the Skinned Cat’s main room. He scooted through the room beyond, in which a number of Bright Crusaders players nursed their wounds and their pride. Dunk didn’t know if any of them recognised him — he saw Sister Mister weeping into a trough of ale that M’Grash would have appreciated — but he took comfort in the fact that he could rely on them to stick to the rules and leave him alone off the field.

  The second room back felt smaller than the first because of the draperies that could be pulled across the faces of each booth. About half of these had been drawn, and in the others the occupants shot Dunk dirty looks for glancing in their direction. Six people — a goblin, an elf, three orcs, and a dwarf — sat around a table in the middle of the room, playing a low-stakes hand of pogre. Dunk had tried to play the game with M’Grash a few times, but they stopped when Dunk realised the game was designed to start fights.

  The door to the third room back stood closed. It took Dunk a while to find it. At first, he thought it was an exit to the place’s outdoor privy. Seeing no other option, though, he tried it. The latch rose easily, and the door pushed inward on oiled hinges.

  “Hello, Dunkel,” a voice said. “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”

  26

  Dunk slipped into the room, but left the door open behind him. The sounds of the pogre players and of the rooms beyond comforted him somehow. The thought of cutting them off, of leaving him alone in this room with Lady Helgreta Brecher, terrified him.

  “Please,” Helgreta said, motioning to the chair next to her at the lone table in the room. “Have a seat.”

  The room was, in fact, a booth all to itself. Two stuffed leather chairs crouched next to a small, circular table made of clean, polished wood, all of which were of exquisite make. The place smelled of fresh cedar — which Dunk saw lined the walls — and an enticing perfume, which he recognised as Helgreta’s favourite scent.

  Helgreta looked as stunning as ever. Her auburn curls had straightened a bit as she’d let her hair grow out, but her wide, dark eyes issued the same strong invitation to him that they always had. She carried a few more wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, and to Dunk’s chagrin they seemed to have been caused by frowning.

  A pair of golden goblets sat on the table in front of her, next to an uncorked bottle of wine — an excellent vintage by Dunk’s memory. He hadn’t bothered to keep track of such things since fleeing from his home four years ago. The cups stood empty, but somehow Dunk caught the scent of spirits from somewhere else.

  “You look well,” Dunk said as he took the seat offered to him. He found he could not relax in it. Instead, he perched on its edge, his hands on the table in front of him. “The years have been kind to you.”

  “You flatter me,” Helgreta said with a sly grin. As she spoke, Dunk knew from where the smell of alcohol had come: her breath. She batted her eyes at him, “But you always did have a way with words.”

  Dunk blushed at this and lowered his eyes. “I must apologise,” he said, “for not answering your letters. By the time they reached me—”

  “No need,” Helgreta said, placing a hand on his. “Those were trying times. I understand that you needed to take care of yourself then and couldn’t possibly have spared time for me.”

  “It’s not that I didn’t—”

  “Hush,” Helgreta said, pursing her soft, red lips. “Let’s not insult the memory of what we once had with such words.”

  Dunk smiled at her softly. This was going better than he could have hoped. The sense of dread he’d felt since Gunther had announced Helgreta was here slowly sloughed away. “You’re far too kind,” he said.

  Helgreta breathed in through her nose, her smile now thin and brittle. “Adversity builds character, or so they tell me.”

  Dunk glanced down at her hand on his. It bore no ring. “You never married?” he asked. “I find that hard to believe.”

  Helgreta frowned. “I — Since you insist… After the incident in my family’s home, we were tainted with suspicions of dealing with daemons as well. Arranging another marriage for me proved…”

  “Difficult?”

  “Impossible.” She sighed. “But I never minded. I’d already given my heart away once. Since it was never returned to me, I didn’t have it to bestow on another.”

  Dunk felt ill. He glanced at the wine, but his appetite for such things had left him.

  “How is your family?” he asked, hoping to change the subject she’d claimed to wish to avoid.

  Helgreta smiled pleasantly. “Well, for the most part. My father still soldiers on, despite the way half of his body was paralysed by a stroke following that horrid, fateful night. Sadly, we lost my mother soon after that. Some say she died of sheer shame.”

  “How about your cousins?” Dunk asked. Helgreta had always been close to them, and he had enjoyed carousing with them in more carefree days.

  “With the taint that followed us, we were forced to ever more desperate measures to retain our holdings and position. Karl disappeared while leading a caravan over the Grey Mountains to Parravon. Kurt, though, decided to follow in your footsteps.”

  “He was chased from his family home by an angry mob?”

  The bitter look Helgreta shot Dunk was as far from the smile he’d hoped for as he could imagine.

  “He took up Blood Bowl. He said, ‘If Dunk and Dirk can do it, then why not me?’ Did you know you two set off quite a trend among the disaffected sons and daughters of the Empire’s elite? For a while, there was even an all-nobility team called ‘the Imperial Counts’.”

  Dunk thought hard on this. “Whatever happened to them? I don’t think I ever heard of them.”

  “They became embroiled in a trademark dispute with a team of vampires from the Dark Lands over the ‘Counts’ name. They submitted to binding arbitration over it, and the vampires bound them and bled them dry.”

  Dunk gasped. “Was Kurt on that team?”

  “No, sadly,” Helgreta said. “That would have been far easier for him, I’m sure.”

  “What happened to him?” Dunk wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer, but he couldn’t keep from asking.

  “He started to question his sexuality. Then, while he was at his most vulnerable, he fell in with a team — more a cult, really — called the Bright Crusaders.”

  Rivers of ice ran through Dunk’s veins. “You can’t be—”

  “He became a ‘brother’ in their organisation. He took on the new name ‘Mother’ to show how he’d channelled his maternal urges into helping the team and furthering the cause of good and fair play, both on the field and off. They raised thousands of crowns for poor children through their charity matches alone, and Karl donated all but a small portion of his wages to keeping the homeless off the streets — via a euthanasia program he started before he joined the team.”

  “The Association for the Revolution of Self-Euthanasia?”

  “You’ve heard of them?” Helgreta smiled warmly. “Karl would have been so pleased. I unde
rstand they’ve started a Blood Bowl team of their own. Karl said he often scrimmaged against them and dispatched at least one opponent each game — with the dignity they deserved, of course.”

  Dunk put a hand over his mouth.

  “Helgreta, I—”

  “I know,” she said. “It was your job to kill him, and I don’t begrudge you that. He’d lost so much weight over the past few years, I wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t recognised him at all.”

  Dunk nodded. Between that, the armour, and the man’s caked-on make-up, he couldn’t possibly have known who Brother Mother had once been — or so he told himself. Still, he had to set the record straight.

  “I didn’t kill him though,” he said. “I tried to save him. I didn’t want for him to tackle me.”

  “Oh, you weren’t the first player to flee from Karl’s embrace,” Helgreta said. “He scared more than one macho man off the field with his aggressive yet feminine ways.”

  Dunk shook his head. “That’s not it. I didn’t know who he was, other than another innocent Blood Bowl player.”

  Helgreta failed to stifle a giggle. “Is there any such animal as an ‘innocent Blood Bowl player’?”

  “I just wanted to keep from having Zauberer kill him,” said Dunk.

  “Ah, yes,” Helgreta smiled, but Dunk felt no warmth behind it, “the wizard who’s threatening your life. Aren’t you getting tired of using that excuse?”

  Dunk stared at her. “What do you mean? It’s not imaginary. So far, he’s struck down anyone who’s managed to tackle me on the field.”

  “And yet you keep playing. Why is that?”

  “I…” Dunk had wrestled with this question a great deal on his own. “It’s complicated.”

  Helgreta picked up the bottle of wine and proceeded to fill the two glasses sitting in front of her and Dunk. “We have the whole night ahead of us.”

  That thought made Dunk shiver, but he decided to take a shot at explaining himself anyhow. When he looked at Helgreta and saw what had happened to her family and her life, he knew she deserved at least that much.

  “There are a number of reasons, and they all get mixed together in my head. First, my coach demands that I play. I’ve signed a contract with him to play. If I don’t play, I get fired.”