[Blood Bowl 02] - Dead Ball Read online

  “Do you want to be with me?”

  A tiny gasp worked its way past Spinne’s soft, sweet lips. She stared at Dunk for a moment, and he saw tears welling up in her eyes. She looked like she might attack him right there. He braced himself for anything.

  Still, he didn’t expect the kiss. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him so hard he fell backward onto the bed once again.

  When they broke their embrace, Dunk looked up into Spinne’s eyes once more. They were bright and happy.

  “Is that a yes?” he asked.

  She kissed him again, and they needed no more words.

  Late that night, as Spinne slept in his arms, Dunk lay awake and thought of the future. He’d never loved anyone as much as he loved this woman. In his younger days, he’d dallied with a few damsels, but most of them had been after his family’s money. When that had disappeared, so had they — all except for Lady Helgreta Brecher, to whom he’d been betrothed.

  While Dunk had liked Helgreta well enough, the thought of marrying her had given him many restless nights. He’d not been a good fiancé to her, but she’d stuck by him, even through his family’s fall from grace. Her parents had demanded that she abandon her commitment to him, but she’d refused. It had been Dunk who’d had to dissolve their agreement.

  Marrying Helgreta would have restored Dunk to some semblance of nobility in Altdorf, but at the cost of his self-respect. He’d only discovered after the fall of his family that he had any, and he wasn’t about to sacrifice it so cavalierly again — even for a shot at getting his old life back.

  Dunk had never wanted to play Blood Bowl. He’d shared his father’s contempt for the game, and he’d joined in the family’s scorning of Dirk when he left home to play. Still, so many good things had come to him since he’d let Slick talk him into trying out for the Reavers: wealth, fame, and now even love. He had a hard time imagining why he’d fought it for so long.

  Then Dunk remembered the fallen on the gridiron. He’d lost many team-mates — friends, even — in the past year. Were all the gains in his life worth having to watch good men and women die?

  As Dunk’s eyes wandered about the room, his gaze drifted past the window, and he saw something there that made him leap from the bed. His movement thrust Spinne away from him, and he heard her sleeping form crash to the floor as he reached the window and threw open the sash.

  “Ow!” Spinne said as she awoke. “What in the Chaos Wastes?”

  Dunk shoved his head out the window and glared all around. They were on the building’s third floor. He couldn’t have seen what he saw.

  “What is it?” Spinne said, her voice filled with concern as she crept up behind him.

  From down on the street below, a shout went up. Dunk looked down and saw a small group of Blood Bowl fans staring up at him and pointing and laughing. He waved down at them as he wondered how they could recognise him from this distance and in the dimness of a half moon.

  Then he looked down at himself and saw that he was naked.

  Dunk slammed the window shut and turned to find himself nose to nose with Spinne.

  “Trying to give your fans a free show?” she asked.

  Dunk blushed, first with embarrassment, then with frustration. “I just — I thought — I saw something outside.”

  Spinne peered around him at the half moon framed in the window, the silvery light spilling over her toned body and smooth skin. Then she reached up and put her arms around his neck. “You had a bad dream,” she said.

  “No.” Dunk shook his head. “I saw it. It…”

  Spinne stared up into his eyes. “What?” she said. “What was it? What could upset you so much you’d knock me clear out of bed?”

  “Sorry about that,” Dunk said, caressing her thighs. “Are you all right?”

  “Are you?” she asked.

  He hung his head sheepishly. “It…” He drew a deep breath. “I thought I saw Skragger.”

  Saying the name somehow made it all seem even more real. As a star Blood Bowl player for the Orcland Raiders, Skragger had held the record for most touchdowns in a year. When Dunk’s brother Dirk had closed in on the record, Skragger had threatened to kill them both. He almost had.

  Spinne’s eyes grew wide. “He’s dead. We all saw him jump out of that window in Altdorf. We saw his body after he landed.”

  “I know,” Dunk said, “but…”

  Spinne took Dunk’s arm. “Come back to bed. It’s the middle of the night, and you’re anxious about your trip.”

  He let her pull him back into the bed. “Are you hurt?” he asked as she pulled the sheets over them and settled down next to him.

  Spinne winced a little as she curled into his arms. “If I didn’t love you so much…”

  Dunk froze for a moment before his face broke into a wide, toothy grin. “What did you just say?”

  “Shh,” Spinne said, laying a finger across his lips before resting her head on his chest. “Don’t make a big deal out of it.”

  Dunk gazed down at her face as she closed her eyes and melted into him. He’d never seen anything so beautiful. “I love you too,” he said.

  Spinne smiled.

  7

  Dunk vomited over the side of the Sea Chariot as the sea churned beneath the Hackers’ ship. He watched as the remains of his breakfast splashed into the briny waters and swirled about. A school of sharks following in the ship’s wake attacked it as if it was alive, devouring it in seconds.

  “Dunk gonna die?” M’Grash said from behind, patting the thrower on the back.

  Dunk peered back over his shoulder to see the honest concern etched on the ogre’s massive face. The creature had lost most of his own meal half an hour earlier, and he looked a bit less green now than he had before. Dunk suspected that incident had attracted the sharks in the first place.

  “I’m not that lucky,” Dunk said, reaching back to pat the back of M’Grash’s kettle-sized hand.

  “That’s what you get for blowing off Nuffle’s services before every game,” Simon said with self-righteous dignity. The fact that he looked happy and healthy only made it worse.

  “How are you not dying along with the rest of us landlubbers?” Dunk asked, thinking he might have to force some sort of misery on Simon just to even the score.

  The Albionman patted his belly. “Iron stomach,” he said. “Runs in the family. I come from a long line of seamen.”

  “Don’t we all,” Slick cracked. He bore a steaming bowl of something in his hands.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Simon asked, his happy facade cracked.

  “Never mind,” Slick said as he handed the bowl to Dunk.

  The thrower tried to shove it away. “I don’t care if that’s food from the fields of the gods,” he said. “I’m not putting it in my belly just so it can launch itself straight out again.”

  “Nonsense, son,” said Slick, pressing the bowl into Dunk’s hands. “Pegleg made this himself. A weak broth to help settle your stomach. It’s a long way to Albion still, and you have to keep your strength up.”

  Dunk accepted the bowl but couldn’t bring himself to try the broth. It was so thin he could see through it to the bottom of the bowl, but it still seemed like too much. He bent over it and gave it a good, long sniff. Then he shoved the bowl back at Slick and went back to his spot on the railing.

  The halfling shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He took up the spoon and tasted the broth himself. “Ah, now that’s good stuff.”

  Dunk tried to retch, but his stomach refused to produce anything from its emptiness. After a moment, he turned back and slumped down on the deck, his back to the railing. As he did, Guillermo dashed up next to him and blew his own breakfast into the rolling waters.

  When Dunk could look up again, he saw Cavre waving at him from the bridge. The dark-skinned man looked at home there behind the wheel, as comfortable on a ship as he was on the gridiron.

  “Only another day from here, Mr. Hoffnung,” he called.
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  Dunk groaned at the thought of the torture ahead of him. He’d felt fine for the first part of the trip, but they’d reached the open sea sometime last night. Between that and a squall that had stirred up the rough seas, his stomach seemed determined to crawl up his oesophagus and leap straight out from his mouth. If he could have, he would have let it.

  “How’s Pegleg?” Dunk asked.

  Slick drained the last of the broth from the bowl and put it down on the rocking deck. “Fine,” the halfling said. “Good thing too, as he absolutely refuses to leave his cabin still.”

  “Does he ever?” asked Simon.

  “Not while we’re at sea. You know how he is about studying game tapes.”

  “Can’t he get those on Daemonic Visual Display yet?” Dunk asked. “Dirk was right. Those DVDs are amazing.”

  Slick shook his head. “These all come from Albion, and they don’t use the same broadcast standards as we do in the Old World. Pegleg had to buy an Albion-made crystal ball just so he could watch the tapes.”

  “Really?” said Simon, perking up even more than usual. “I’ll have to ask if he gets any Soaring Circus broadcasts on that cryssy. I haven’t seen that show since I left home.”

  “Does anyone else wonder why we haven’t seen any other ships out here?” Dunk said as Guillermo slipped down next to him, wiping his mouth clean. “Maybe it’s because everyone smarter than us turned back. Here we are with an ex-pirate captain — who’s afraid of water — and a crew of six others, three of whom are too sick to stand.”

  “Don’t you worry about it, son,” Slick said, patting the thrower on the shoulder. “Cavre is an excellent sailor. Why, he could take this ship all the way around Albion and back home by himself.”

  “Can’t he save himself the trouble and start back now?”

  “You’d miss fair Albion entirely?” Simon asked, staring out to the northwest. “What a pity that would be.”

  Dirk turned and saw nothing but rolling seas stretching to the horizon. He had to sit down again. “The way you talk about the place, I thought you didn’t miss it.”

  Simon seemed to ponder this for a moment. “I often like to say that Albion is a fine place to be from.” He smirked a little at this. “Still, it’s where I was born, and I still have many friends and family there. It’s a land unlike any other, an island unto itself in more ways than mere geography. I shall enjoy my time there again, and I shall miss it when I leave.”

  “And will you leave it again?” Guillermo asked. “If this home of yours is so fantastic, I would think you would stay instead.”

  Simon bowed his head before he spoke. “Leave it I shall, I’m afraid, for leave it I must. Its pull increases as I draw near, I confess, but there are other matters drawing me away as well.”

  With that, the Albionman turned and strode back across the deck toward the bridge where Cavre stood waving at him to lend a hand.

  “Seems the nearer he gets, the more his mouth runs on about it,” Dunk said.

  “Perhaps,” Slick said, “he protests too much.”

  “Now this is more like it,” Dunk said as he hefted a massive glass of beer to join in a toast to the Hackers’ arrival in Albion. He’d not had anything to eat in two days. Even when they’d finally made it to the shores of this distant land, his stomach had been too busy swirling around inside of him for him to attempt to put food in it.

  The Albion beer, though, looked too good to pass up. He’d ordered a round of ale upon walking through the door of the nameless, whitewashed pub. It had taken the bartender half of forever to supply it, with Simon blathering all the while about how the pints here were hand-pulled in the old way — none of those magical taps so popular on the Continent, as he’d now taken to calling the Old World.

  But the beer was here now, and a table full of food that Simon had ordered for the team was on its way. Dunk raised his glass and joined the others in saying, “Cheers!”

  When Dunk knocked back the beer, he almost choked. Although it looked just a bit darker than the Killer Genuine Draft he favoured back home, this stuff had far more flavour. So instead of the refreshing cold drink he expected, he got a mouthful of warm sludge.

  Dunk glanced around. Slick, sitting on a high stool that brought him up to the height of the others — who sat on leather-upholstered benches around the low table that squatted between them — smacked his lips as he put lowered his drink and cradled it in his hands like a long-lost child perched safely on his lap. Simon put his pint down after draining half of it, a wide and satisfied smile on his face. Pegleg drained his entire glass and then smashed it on the floor.

  Cavre put down his pint with great care, the liquid in the glass barely touched. M’Grash had popped back his first and second pints while waiting for the others to finish their toast. Now he nursed his third. Guillermo drained about half his pint, and then stopped dead, his eyes bulging. He turned and spat everything in his mouth onto the floor, gagging and coughing as if nearly drowned.

  The others stared at him for a moment, none of them moving. Pegleg nodded at M’Grash and said, “Give Mr. Reyes a hand, Mr. K’Thragsh, would you?”

  The ogre nodded, then reached out and slapped Guillermo on the back with a meaty mitt. The blow knocked the Estalian from his feet and into a nearby table, where Guillermo made a poor first impression on a group of local dockworkers by smashing their table to pieces and spilling all their drinks in the process.

  The angry dockworkers dragged Guillermo to his feet. One of them, a surly dwarf with a blue-tinged beard and a series of piercings along his right cheekbone, smashed the top of his glass off on the back of his chair and jabbed it at the Estalian’s face. An instant later, the same dockworker smashed into the far wall of the pub and slid down to the floor in a broken heap.

  Dunk clapped M’Grash on the arm for taking out the primary threat so quickly. Then the other dockworkers — none of whom looked any more reasonable than the first — turned on the Hackers and snarled at them like a pack of hungry wolves.

  “Now, gentlemen,” Slick said, spreading his arms open wide as he stood upon his stool. “It was a simple accident followed by a misunderstanding. Can we buy you a round and call it even?”

  One of the dockworkers — a balding, pot-bellied man burned a deep brown from constant exposure to the sun — stepped forward, a pair of short, sharp knives filling his hands. “Ye killed the Runt,” he snarled. “Ye won’t be leaving the pub alive.”

  Dunk nodded at the man, and then turned to M’Grash. “Take care of them, would you, big guy?”

  The dockworkers each took a step back as M’Grash stared out at them. Then the ogre looked down at Dunk, confused. “Hurt them?” he said. “Dunkel said hurting wrong.”

  Dunk goggled at the ogre. In the previous season, Dunk had discovered that M’Grash had murdered people to help out his friends — Dunk included. The thrower had put a stop to that and had sat M’Grash down to explain to him in no uncertain terms that killing was wrong.

  “Remember what I said about self-defence,” Dunk said. “These people want to hurt us. Isn’t protecting your friends why you knocked the Runt clear across the pub?”

  “That wrong?”

  Dunk grimaced at how eager the ogre was to please him. He’d worked hard to try to impart some sense of morality to the creature. He should have expected something like this to happen.

  “No, M’Grash,” he said, patting the ogre on his elbow. “There are exceptions to every—”

  A pint of ale sailed through the air and smashed into the side of Dunk’s head, coating him in beer and broken glass. He fell to the ground, dazed. A mighty roar from next to him nearly ruptured his eardrums. Still, he heard a stampede of footfalls rushing away from him and then the screams of souls in mortal fear of losing their lives. Many things smashed, and a chair flew over his head and crashed into the wall behind him before he could raise his head again.

  “You’ll be all right, son,” Slick said, standing at Dunk’s si
de. “M’Grash could take down the whole lot of them by himself.” A series of pounding noises punctuated the agent’s words. “Ouch. That has to hurt.”

  When Dunk managed to stagger to his feet, he looked up to see the Hackers standing in the centre of a ruined room. Every set of tables and chairs lay in chunks on the floor; unconscious patrons sprawled across them, sleeping as if the bits of smashed furniture were more comfortable than any bed. In the opposite wall, three men hung slack from their necks with their heads shoved straight through the battered plaster.

  “Any of the rest of you scurvy dogs care to try your luck?” Pegleg snarled, brandishing a bloodied hook before him.

  The other patrons of the bar, who’d all stopped whatever they were doing to watch the fight, turned back to their drinks and restarted their conversations. All but one man, that was.

  The man stepped up from a distant corner of the pub. He wore a royal blue cloak with a set of ram’s horns embroidered in gold thread on his cowl. Underneath the cloak, he stood tall and broad, unbent by his years, at which Dunk could only guess from the wrinkles on his hands and the tip of his reddish-grey beard that jutted from the darkness under his hood.

  The man strode forward with an athlete’s grace. The others in the bar parted for him as he approached and closed behind him again as he passed. He walked straight for Dunk and Slick, ignoring the others. The other Hackers, sensing a threat, closed in around the stranger. M’Grash reached out to grab the man and hurl him out of the pub, but a gesture from Pegleg froze the ogre in his tracks.

  When the man stopped in front of Dunk, the thrower could see his eyes glittering under the cowl. Blue and piercing, they seemed as if they could peer straight into Dunk’s soul. The thrower felt a strong urge to ask the man what he saw there. Before he could, though, the man spoke, his words flavoured by a thick brogue.

  “Faith, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a man who tried to face a foe with words ’stead of a fist.”

  The man’s lilting accent tickled Dunk’s ear and threatened to make him smile. Instead, he stuck out his hand in greeting. “The pleasure’s mine.”