[Blood Bowl 02] - Dead Ball

by Matt Forbeck - (ebook by Undead)

  Dunk glared across the table at the ex-pirate and the wizard hunched over next to him, whispering something in his ear. Edgar and M’Grash stared back and forth at them both, waiting for something to happen. Cavre gave Dunk an appraising look, his face betraying nothing.

  The others — the new players who’d joined the team in Bad Bay — all looked to Pegleg for direction. Dunk knew that they’d turn on him and tear him to pieces at a word from their coach.

  Olsen refused to meet Dunk’s glare.

  “Can you explain that, Mr. Hoffnung?”

  “Explain what, coach?”

  Pegleg leaned forward in his chair. “Just why a game-hardened veteran like Mr. Sherwood might dissolve into tears like that in your presence.”

  A dozen snappy answers rolled through Dunk’s brain: the body odour of the new team-mates; the fact that the bar was out of Killer Lite; the godlike presence Dunk exuded that made all lesser men reconsider their manhood; the fact that M’Grash had asked Simon if he could borrow a tissue. But he cast all those aside. It was time to tackle the truth.

  “It’s the Far Albion Cup,” Dunk said. “We need to get rid of it.”

  Pegleg rolled his eyes theatrically, and the new players all began to mutter murderous somethings under their breath. “Are we on to that again, Mr. Hoffnung? Honestly, it’s become tiresome. The cup is staying with us, and that is that.”

  Dunk got to his feet. “Coach, you can’t tell me that you don’t see what that thing has done to us. Maybe you don’t feel it when we’re in the middle of a game — you’re in the dugout, not on the field — but it’s turned us into a pack of killers, a bunch of murderous thugs.”

  Pegleg laughed maliciously at this. “And how am I supposed to tell the difference between that and a regular Blood Bowl team?” he asked. Then realisation spread across his face. “Oh, yes! I know now. It’s that we’ve finally started playing like a regular Blood Bowl team.”

  The new players and Olsen all laughed along with Pegleg’s mirthless joke. Only M’Grash, Edgar, and Cavre did not join in.

  “The cup was behind Simon’s disease too,” Dunk said. “He has the same illness as those cultists we took it from.”

  “Mr. Sherwood should consider that an abject lesson in taking care in picking his flings — and his friends.”

  Dunk shook his head. “Don’t you remember Deckem and his crew? The cup brought us those recruits. What makes you think this lot here isn’t just as tainted?”

  The new players all scowled at Dunk then, and a shudder ran through him as he realised just how outnumbered he was. This wasn’t a time for him to think about his personal safety though. He had to convince Pegleg to give up the cup.

  “This is about your brother, isn’t it?” Pegleg said. “Him and that Schönheit woman you’ve been seeing.” He shook his head. “Were we in the navy, I’d have you flogged for consorting with the enemy.”

  “They’re players on another team.”

  Pegleg smashed his hook into the table at that. “They are the enemy!” he thundered. “We must do everything we can to crush the enemy. That’s the difference between winners and losers!”

  “You didn’t have a problem with that before,” Dunk said.

  “We lost before, didn’t we, Mr. Hoffnung? I let my urge to be a good coach — a friend to my players — blind me. I don’t want to be a good coach any more.”

  “Congratulations,” Dunk started. “You’re well on your—”

  “I want to be a great coach! I want to lead my team to win championships! The Bad Bay Hackers have been losers for the last time! And I will kill anyone who stands in my way!” Pegleg snarled at his star thrower before he lowered his voice to a menacing whisper. “Including you.”

  “Ah, gee,” Blaque said as he strode through the door, Whyte walking alongside him. “What’s the chance of him being named coach of the year with an attitude like that?”

  Whyte shook his head as they stood next to each other at the foot of the table, just to Dunk’s right. “Not good,” the pale-skinned elf said. “Not good at all.”

  “Faith!” Olsen said, standing up at the other end of the table, a little rickety from too much drink. “We don’t believe anyone invited you two blackguards to this party. Leave, or we’ll throw you bastards out ourselves.”

  “We’re here for the cup,” Blaque said. “And we’re not leaving until we get it.”

  The sound of chairs scraping backward as every player in the room rose to his feet filled the otherwise silent air. The two Game Wizards stared down the table at the assembled Hackers, and Dunk wished, not for the first time tonight, that he was someplace else.

  “Stand down, men,” Pegleg said to the players and to Olsen as well. “Stand down. It’s far too late for the GWs to do anything about the cup at this point — or for anyone else.” He glared directly at Dunk and just down behind him.

  Dunk turned to see Slick peeking in around the edge of the dining hall’s doorway. He waved a little hand at the thrower, than disappeared before Pegleg could snarl at him again.

  Pegleg looked at the Game Wizards, his gaze flicking back and forth between the two. Then he gestured for the players to all sit. The new ones sat without further comment. Edgar and M’Grash waited to see what Dunk would do. When he sat down too, they complied as well. Cavre was the last to take his seat.

  Olsen remained standing. When Pegleg nodded at him, he turned to the GWs and said, “Once a team has taken full possession of the cup, there is nothing that can be done to break it, short of disbanding the entire team.”

  “You think that can be arranged, Mr. Whyte?”

  “Certainly, Mr. Blaque. Mr. Murdark tells me he’s behind us a thousand percent. Something about how killing off one team after another could be construed as harmful to the long-term prospects of the sport.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Pegleg said. “We’re just about to play in the Blood Bowl finals. You’d rob us of that? The fans would scream foul for decades to come. Anyway, you can’t do it. It’s not your choice.”

  Blaque grimaced. “True enough, but we don’t have to disband the team to stop you. We just have to refuse to let you play in the game.”

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else Wolf Sports won’t broadcast it.”

  Pegleg snorted at this. “Blood Bowl has a dozen networks lined up to take your place.”

  “Just give us the cup, Captain Haken,” Blaque said. “It doesn’t have to go down this way.”

  “It won’t do you any good,” Pegleg said. “It’s been attuned to us — to me. And it can only be destroyed if Olsen here drinks his own blood from it.”

  It was Blaque’s turn to snort as he drew his wand. “We’d be happy to make that happen. What would you think about that, Mr. Whyte?”

  “Icing on the cake,” the pale elf said, pulling his wand from his robes as well.

  “We’ll fight you lot to our dying breath,” Olsen said, his wand appearing his in hand. “Destroying the cup would kill us dead. You two only have your jobs on the line. For us, it’s our life.”

  “Sounds like more icing to me,” Blaque said.

  “Hold it,” Dunk said, surprising even himself. “Wait. It doesn’t have to happen like this.”

  “We don’t mind,” said Blaque. “Really.”

  “Belay that,” Pegleg said. His soft words carried throughout the room. “If you destroy the cup, you’ll seal my fate as well.”

  “Come on, coach,” Dunk said. “It won’t be that bad. We made it to the finals last year on our own, without the cup. We can do it again, and we can win!”

  The ex-pirate shook his head sadly. “Aye. Maybe we could at that, Mr. Hoffnung, but I’ve made my choice and bound myself to the cup in every way possible.”

  A shiver ran down Dunk’s spine. “What are you talking about, coach?” He knew he didn’t want to hear the answer. He didn’t want to, but he had to anyway.

  Pegleg held up his hook and used his good hand to
pull back that sleeve, baring the maimed arm. There, in the crook of his arm, he wore a large, white bandage, a few dark spots on it where the blood had seeped through.

  “With Mr. Merlin’s help, I bled myself into that damned cup of his, and then I drank my fill.”

  “Bloody, bleeding hell,” Edgar said. “That’s not like someone tapping a tree, mate. You could have lost your life.”

  Pegleg wore a sad smirk on his lips. “It wasn’t my life I lost, Edgar, but a part of my soul. That special piece of me now resides in the cup, right alongside the spirits of Mr. Merlin and Miss Retmatcher.”

  Dunk wanted to vomit. “Why, coach? Why would you do that?”

  Pegleg arched his eyebrows. “A cup — even one as magnificent as that one — is a thing. As such, it can be lost, stolen, or otherwise go missing, just as it once did for over five hundred years.” He bowed his head for a second before continuing on. “I — I couldn’t let it just leave me. I couldn’t take the chance it might be taken from me. It’s been a long, hard road to find myself standing just outside the winner’s circle, waiting for you mates to pour the cooler full of Haterade over me. I just couldn’t let it get away.”

  “You are terrified of water, coach,” Cavre said quietly.

  “For that, Mr. Cavre, I think I might have been able to make an exception. Just once.”

  “So, if the cup is destroyed?” Blaque said.

  “I’ll die, along with Mr. Merlin here,” Pegleg said. “And you’ll have our deaths on both of your heads.”

  “What do you think about that, Mr. Whyte?” Blaque said.

  “Sounds like cherries on top.”

  The two wizards levelled their wands at Pegleg and Merlin.

  Without a word, the players all got back on their feet. The threat was clear. If the GWs made a move, the Hackers would make sure they’d pay.

  Dunk’s mind flashed back to his last up-close encounter with battle magic, when Olsen had flung that lightning bolt down the tunnel and fried all those deadmen. He didn’t know what it would be like to be in a room with three powerful wizards letting loose their worst on each other, but he didn’t want to find out.

  Dunk smashed Blaque in the face with his elbow, and then spun past him to drive his fist into Whyte’s gut. Both wizards went down hard, and before they could realise what — or who — had hit them, he snatched their wands from their hands.

  “You’ll regret that,” Blaque said, his nose bleeding freely. Whyte sat on the ground, still struggling to catch his breath.

  “The only thing I regret,” Dunk said, “is not doing it sooner. This doesn’t have anything to do with you two or Wolf Sports. It’s a Hacker matter, and the Hackers will handle it — alone.”

  Blaque’s fists started to crackle with raw power. “We don’t need the wands, you know. They only help us to focus our spells. We could still bring the roof of this place down around your — urk!”

  With the GW still in mid-threat, M’Grash plucked him from his feet and held him dangling in the air. Edgar did the same with Whyte, who struggled not at all, still trying to get air back into his lungs. The treeman held him out at arm’s length, dangling him there in his smaller branches as if the wizard might somehow be toxic.

  “Listen to Dunkel,” M’Grash said directly into the dwarf’s face. “Dunkel, Dunkel, Dunkel smart!”

  Blaque nodded, then spat in the ogre’s face. “You and your barking mad friend there had better put us both down, or I’ll—”

  M’Grash dropped the dwarf, who landed with a hard thud. Edgar did the same with Whyte.

  “Toss them out of here,” Dunk said. “If they come back, toss them farther — like into the Reik.”

  “I hear they have forty-foot-long, carnivorous, mutant eels that glow in the dark living in that river,” Slick said, poking his head back in the room.

  “They’d be lucky to have those find them first,” said Dunk as M’Grash and Edgar stormed out of the room, toting the GWs under their arms like a couple of footballs come to squirming life.

  “So, Dunk,” Pegleg called out from the far end of the table, “are we good then?”

  Dunk glanced back over his shoulder at the ex-pirate standing there next to Olsen. “Not by a million yards,” he said. “I’m trying to make sure we don’t all get killed, because you know that’s what it’ll come to next, right? As soon as word gets out that we have some kind of magic goblet that keeps us from losing, someone else is going to want it. Even if they can’t get it, they’ll settle for killing us, just so their team can have a fighting chance.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Olsen asked.

  “It’s what we would do.” With that, Dunk strode out of the room, leaving Pegleg alone with Olsen, Cavre, and their murderous new recruits.

  27

  “What in all the hells did you do?” Lästiges said as she stormed into the Hackers’ practice.

  Dunk held up his hands, both as a gesture of innocence and so he could defend himself if the reporter decided to attack him. She looked angry enough to chew through both M’Grash and Edgar to get to him, and Dunk noticed that his two gigantic friends had scurried out of the way when they had seen the woman coming.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Dunk said slowly, trying to calm Lästiges down.

  “With Dirk and Spinne!” she said. “Are you out of your walnut of a mind?”

  Dunk winced and glanced up at the golden camra hovering over the reporter’s head. “Is this on the record or deep background?”

  “What were you thinking, talking to the Gobbo?” A vein in her normally flawless forehead pulsed so hard and fast that Dunk feared it might burst.

  “Ah, that,” Dunk said, putting an arm around the woman and gathering her to him as he walked her off the field. None of the Hackers knew about Dunk’s attempt to cut a deal with the bookie, and he wanted to keep it that way. “Let’s talk somewhere more private.”

  Lästiges let the thrower escort her from the practice field. He waved at the other players, and said, “I’ll be right back,” to Cavre. Pegleg and Olsen, who’d been chatting at the other end of the field stopped to watch the two leave, but they said nothing to stop them.

  Dunk steered Lästiges through an open doorway in the high, stone wall that surrounded the place, which Pegleg had paid an exorbitant fee to rent. Most of the money went not for the field itself, which was fine enough, but to pay for the strict security surrounding the place. With the Blood Bowl finals looming ahead, Pegleg wanted to make sure his players didn’t have to worry about angry rivals or overexcited fans. Dunk wondered for a moment how Lästiges had got through, but he realised that other reporters wandered in and out of the place all the time. Her press pass must have been enough.

  As they strode into the empty locker room, Lästiges jabbed an elbow into Dunk’s ribs and strode away from him while he rubbed his injured side.

  “What was that for?” he asked.

  “You deserve a lot worse,” she said, spinning to wag a long, crimson-nailed finger at him. “Making a pact with the Gobbo to get Breitzel to ruin the Reavers’ game? You might as well have cut a deal with Khorne himself!”

  Dunk put his hands up in front of him again, just in case. “I only meant—”

  “It doesn’t — that doesn’t — I don’t care what you meant to do. ‘I just wanted to save my little brother and my little girlfriend’. Well, you screwed that up and everything else too!”

  “Hey, at least I tried. I did something. You were with us when we found the cup. You know how it works. You know what’s going to happen in the finals. We’re going to systematically murder the Reavers on the gridiron.”

  “I know,” Lästiges said, putting a hand to her forehead, perhaps trying to hold that pulsing vein back from bursting. “I tried to tell them that. I know you did too, but what you did…”

  “It didn’t work anyway,” Dunk said, surprised at his own bitterness. A part of him had been relieved to not end up beholden to the Gobbo, but he woul
d have gladly been so if it would have saved Spinne and Dirk’s lives. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “So you think,” Lästiges said. “They know all about it.”

  Dunk felt a chill in his gut. “Who?”

  “Spinne and Dirk! Once Breitzel came to in the infirmary, they really put the screws to him. He gave them the Gobbo’s name.”

  Dunk closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “They found the Gobbo in the Skinned Cat, and he skavened you out. Then they came looking for me.”

  Dunk opened his eyes again and stared at Lästiges. “Why? You had nothing to do with that.”

  “I know!” she said, frustration marring her picture-perfect face. “But do you think they believed that? They thought I was in on it with you from the beginning.”

  Dunk frowned. “I’ll talk to them,” he said, more to himself than Lästiges. “I’ll set this right.”

  “How?” she asked. “How? They told me they never want to talk to you again. If it weren’t for the finals, they’d never want to see you. Or me either!”

  “I just wanted to keep them safe.”

  “Then you should have quit the game and got them to do the same! Do you know what the average life expectancy of a Blood Bowl player is? Two and a half seasons. And all the immortals who have been playing for hundreds of years throw off that curve! Most players never make it past their first season, either from injury or death or post-traumatic stress.”

  “What’s your point?” Dunk didn’t like where this was going.

  “It’s a dangerous game. Lethal.” She was screaming now, tears flowing, and makeup running down her face. “If you were so damned worried about living forever, you should have stuck to something easier — like fighting dragons!”

  Neither of them said anything for a moment, letting the heavy silence hang between them. The only sound came from Lästiges’ sniffles.

  “Are you through?” Dunk asked.

  Lästiges nodded, wiping her face and nose with a handkerchief she pulled from her pocket.