[Blood Bowl 02] - Dead Ball Read online

  Many of the players gasped in horror. Pegleg nodded knowingly. Dunk noticed that M’Grash licked his chops instead.

  “When Berobsson came back, he pilloried Farley in every public venue he could find. He forced the man to buy his shares of Albion League Football, and he used the proceeds to found the Far Albion League, a proper, Nuffle-would-be-proud group of football teams dedicated to bringing real football to the Isle of Albion.

  “Despite Farley’s best efforts, Berobsson’s work led an exodus of fans and players away from his weaker variety of football to the real thing. Still, we have a strong contingent of Albionmen who, to this day, claim that ALF football is the real thing. They’ve gone so far as to even come up with their own god — a rough sort of chap by the name of Sawker.”

  “Sucker?” Slick wondered aloud. When he realised others had heard him, he slapped his hand over his mouth and blushed.

  Olsen clapped the halfling on the back with a smile, nearly knocking Slick off his high stool. “Some say so, wee one, but Sawker’s adherents take him dead seriously. We have a bit of a feud that goes on here between those who revere him and the right-minded souls who appeal to Nuffle instead.

  “Fans of Sawker have felt the pinch hard in this past while. For decades now, we’ve had to worry about these hooligans rampaging through the streets after an ALF game, kicking over everything they can find. They refuse to use their hands, of course, which means the believers of Nuffle can usually take them in a straight fight, but against helpless, inanimate objects Sawker’s devout do a great deal of pointless damage.”

  “Can anything be done to stop them?” Lästiges asked in her best investigative reporter’s voice. Dunk saw the corners of her mouth turn up in a measure of perverse pride.

  “Aye, lass,” Olsen nodded. “That’s where the Far Albion Cup comes in. Thanks for your kind prompting to keep an old elf’s mind on track.”

  Dunk couldn’t tell if Olsen meant to be sincere or not, but the elf pressed on before he could guess.

  “When Farley started the ALF, he produced a cup to use as the league trophy. It was an amazing thing, made of a reddish metal rarer than gold and set with a fortune in emeralds and diamonds. Legend has it that Farley stole the cup from Tomolandry the Undying, but we’ve not been able to confirm that. Farley’s long dead now, and no one else seems to know for sure.

  “When Berobsson started the FAL, he took the cup from Farley and made it the league championship trophy. It lasted in that position for six years before it disappeared.”

  “It was stolen?” Pegleg said, scratching his hook across the table, scarring its already abused surface.

  “It didn’t take itself out of the Notting Knights trophy case, now did it?” The wizard’s irritation shone through, but Dunk couldn’t tell if it was from frustration with the disappearance or with the question itself.

  “Our apologies, lad,” the wizard said. Dunk had never heard anyone call Pegleg anything other than captain, coach, or sir. “We’ve been searching for the damned thing for the past 500 years, and we don’t seem any closer now than we were then. It’s the most stubborn mystery we’ve ever encountered, and no one seems to have any notion how to resolve it.”

  “So what’s the big deal?” Slick asked.

  All heads swivelled toward the halfling. Dunk couldn’t believe his ears. It wasn’t like his agent to not care about something as valuable as the Far Albion Cup.

  Slick checked his nails for a moment before pretending to realise everyone was waiting for him to continue. He favoured Olsen with a condescending smile.

  “I mean, a wizard like you would hardly spend his whole life searching for such a thing if we were only concerned about the jewels in it, right? You can get diamonds anywhere. All it takes is money, and if you’re involved in Blood Bowl, you’re probably swimming in that. You’re after something you can’t buy, aren’t you?”

  Dunk watched the wizard seethe, his mouth drawn into a tight, straight line, and his eyes narrowed almost to a single point. The thrower thought the wizard might summon up the ability to spit fire and fry Slick to a cinder right there atop his stool. He braced himself to move, although whether toward Slick or away he wasn’t sure.

  “You’re a cunning wee one, you are, laddie,” Olsen said in a flat, reserved tone. He nodded as he continued. “The Far Albion Cup isn’t just a fancy beer stein. It has devilish powers that no one has ever been able to duplicate. Blood has been spilled over it. Bodies been buried for it. And now it’s up to us lot to find it, before it’s too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Dunk asked.

  The wizard swivelled in his chair to stare deep into Dunk’s eyes. When he spoke, his voice rasped like the scraping of a stone lid being removed from a long-buried grave.

  “Too late to save the world.”

  9

  “You’ve lost the stitches on your balls,” Slick said. “If you’re looking to save the world, I hope you’ve hunted for better help. We’re not heroes. We’re football players.”

  “You’re not,” said Guillermo to the halfling.

  “Good point,” Slick said, nodding forcefully. “And neither is Pegleg or the lovely Lästiges over there. You’ve got five players, a halfling, a twice-maimed ex-pirate, and a hack of a lady reporter hurtling straight from up-and-coming to washed-up has-been — sorry, never-was — and you expect us to save the world?”

  “All right,” Olsen said, ignoring Lästiges’ protest at Slick’s evaluation of her career arc. “Fine. Point granted. Recovering the Far Albion Cup may not save the world, but it will put a stop to the plotting of a fiendish coven of cultists who plan to use it to cast all of Albion into their master’s hellish realm!”

  The wizard climbed to his feet as he spoke, and he kept going. By the time he finished, stabbing his finger into the air as he did, he’d clambered atop the table in the middle of the group. The table shook beneath him as he gazed down at the others, realising how far he’d let his fervour carry him.

  “All of Albion, Mr. Merlin?” Pegleg asked, giving the wizard the respect that Slick had neglected to supply.

  The wizard bowed his head, and his shoulders slumped. “Well, maybe not all of it. But a damned good chunk, mate!”

  “Which chunk?” Slick said, squinting into Olsen’s eyes.

  “Uh, well…” The wizard lowered his eyes.

  “Aren’t you really doing this for your own reasons?” Slick asked. “Legend has it that you can only die by drinking your own blood from the cup. Perhaps you tire of this life and want to use us to help you out the door?”

  M’Grash stood up and cracked his knuckles at this, his head scraping against the ceiling of the pub, which hadn’t often hosted an ogre before. “Help now,” M’Grash said with a smile.

  “Aye, lad,” Olsen said, reaching over to pat the ogre on the shoulder. “We appreciate the offer, but we’re afraid it would do us no good. You could pummel us into a pink paste—”

  “I could!” M’Grash tried to jump for joy but smashed a dent in the ceiling’s plaster instead.

  Olsen put up his hands. “Not that we’re asking you to. Faith! We wish it would work. We’ve been killed many a time, to be sure, but the next morning we always wake up without a scratch on us.”

  “So you can’t be killed, then?” Lästiges said. “Permanently, I mean.”

  Olsen shook his head, a grim smile on his face.

  “Does it hurt?” Dunk asked softly, without meaning to. Every face turned toward him, but he ignored all but Olsen’s. “Dying. Death. Does it hurt?”

  Olsen nodded sagely. “Aye, lad. Dying’s never any fun. Being dead’s not so bad, especially for one so ancient as us. It’s getting to that point that’s the trouble.”

  “And that’s where the Hackers come in,” Lästiges said, a smug grin parting her lips.

  Before anyone could respond, Pegleg held up his hook for silence. Then he turned and spoke to the wizard.

  “The question, it seems to me, Mr
. Merlin, isn’t why you want the Far Albion Cup. It’s why should we bother to help you?”

  Olsen smiled as he reached out and shook the ex-pirate’s hook. “Exactly right, lad. Got it one, you did. There’s nothing we appreciate more than a mercenary point of view. You know where you stand with such people at every moment. It’s not about saving the world or even lending a helping hand to a poor elf in need. It’s all about the gold.”

  “That’s not quite—” Cavre started, but Pegleg cut him off.

  “So?” the pirate said, a steely glint in his eyes.

  The wizard glanced around, making sure everyone at the table was ready for what he had to say. “If you lot agree to help, and if we — meaning all of us — manage to recover the Far Albion Cup, then we — meaning ourself — will agree to remand the cup entirely into your keeping once we have employed it in the way we desire most.”

  A confused M’Grash looked at Dunk. “What?”

  “If we help him out, we get to keep the cup.”

  “Ah,” the ogre nodded with a pleased expression. “Good.”

  “Mr. Merlin,” Pegleg said, doffing his yellow tricorn hat, “I think we have a deal.”

  “Where is it that we are again, please?” Guillermo asked.

  Dunk was grateful that the Estalian had asked the question that he was sure had been burning in most of their minds for the past day. After leaving the pub, they’d gone with Olsen to hire enough horses to carry them all — except for M’Grash. None of the mounts Dunk had yet seen in Albion could have ever hoped to carry the ogre.

  Walking seemed to suit M’Grash just fine though. He hadn’t complained a whit since leaving town, just strolling along beside his friends’ mounts, matching their walking speed with his long, smooth strides. It struck Dunk that M’Grash must have felt cramped for most of his life. Having been raised by humans gave the ogre the necessary civilization that allowed him to play on a human Blood Bowl team like the Hackers, but it also meant that the ogre had never been able to use his body to its fullest — except on the gridiron.

  Walking next to Dunk most of the time must have felt to M’Grash like stumbling along with a slow child at his side. Now, able to stretch out and move at something closer to his own pace, the ogre wore a wide and toothy grin on his face.

  “This is the Sure Wood,” Olsen said, gesturing at the tall, leafy trees all around them. As the Hackers had followed the wizard down the iffy and fading trail that led into the forsaken place, the branches had grown higher and thicker together until they almost blotted out the midday sun.

  “Sherwood?” Slick said, looking over at Simon.

  The Albionman shook his head and spelled out the place’s name. “My family does hail from the far side of the wood though. Our name is probably a corruption of the original.”

  “A corruption of a corrupted place,” Guillermo said with a shiver.

  “Does this make your family doubly damned,” Lästiges asked, her camra swivelling to aim at Simon, “or do the two effects cancel each other out?”

  “Doubly damned is nothing,” Olsen said. “These woods are thrice-damned at the least.”

  “You paint such a pretty picture,” Slick said to the wizard. The halfling bounced along astride a stalwart, russet-coloured pony that was the fattest such creature Dunk had ever seen. It wheezed as it rolled along, and the thrower feared it might fall over at any moment.

  “This was once a clean, well-lit place, as such things go,” the wizard said. “Upon a time, a clan of bright-leafed treemen called these woods home, and it was them from which the place took its name.”

  “Were they ‘friends sure and true’?” Dunk asked.

  “Nay,” Olsen said. “They were righteous bastards, always going on like they knew everything there was to know. They were never wrong — could never be wrong — and they let you know it.”

  “Awful sure of themselves, weren’t they?” Slick said, unable to suppress a snicker.

  “Exactly. But that was the source of their downfall. When they finally encountered something for which they had no good explanation, they fell to pieces.”

  “Literally?” Cavre said.

  “Nay right away. The thing they were surest about was the fact they were immortal. When they started dying off, they couldn’t figure out why. At first, they just chalked the first few deaths off to accidents. But they kept dying, one by one.

  “When there were only a few left, they called us in to figure out what was happening to them. You’d never seen such a sorry lot in your lives. They’d pulled out most of their own leaves in worry, and those they had left had turned a bright red from the shame they felt straight down to their roots.”

  “Did you ever figure out what happened to these legendary creatures?” Lästiges asked.

  The wizard nodded. “Root rot. It ate away at their nether regions until they were too fragile to stay upright any longer. Then, well, tim-beeerrr!”

  “And that killed them?” Dunk asked. He looked up at the woods around them, which seemed to be growing darker and closer by the minute.

  “Nay, lad.” Olsen peered out at the trail, which looked to be disappearing as they followed it. “That just brought them down to where the cultists could get at them with their axes. They could have just waited for the rot to take them entirely, but that might have taken years, of course.

  “Root rot’s a horrible thing for a treeman, but when it gets to their knotty excuse for a brain, it’s even more terrible. We found one once that the cultists had somehow missed. He’d been lying there in a gully for months, trapped and waiting for the rot that immobilised him to finally force his grip from life.

  “The thing’s voice was long gone, whittled down to a rasp from weeks of screaming for help that never came. We only stumbled upon him after following a trail of rot spoor that he had left behind as he wound his way into the gully. At first, we didn’t even recognise him as a treeman, stretched across the old streambed like a fallen log. We were walking across him, using him like a bridge when he awoke.

  “The nasty creature spun as we crossed over on him, sending us spiralling into the stream. He tried to tear us apart with what few limbs he had left but we’d fallen out of his reach. Soon enough, we figured out what had happened to him. He whispered a plea for us to finish him off. Those were his last words, lads. His last words.”

  “So the cultists just took advantage of this rot to kill all the treemen?” Lästiges asked. “How awful.”

  “That’s not the half of it, lass,” Olsen said. The cultists weren’t just opportunists. Nay, they were instigators.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They caused that root rot in the first place. It was all part of their master plan to make the Sure Wood theirs.”

  “Or ours!” a voice shouted from somewhere in the darkness.

  Guillermo let out a startled yip. Lästiges caught herself starting to scream. Dunk didn’t even have time for that before he saw several piles on the leaf-strewn floor of the woods around them rise up and point swords and arrows in their direction.

  At first, Dunk feared that a group of young treemen — Treelings? Saplings?—had ambushed them, ready to tear them to pieces in moments. Then he realised that such creatures wouldn’t bother with weapons, instead using their own whip-like branches to flay the intruders to death.

  These were men covered with sticks and leaves. They must have heard the Hackers troupe coming from a mile off and decided to set a trap for them. By burying themselves in the thick layer of rotting detritus on the forest’s floor, they’d kept hidden until the Hackers were right on top of them.

  Dunk cursed himself for not paying better attention to everything happening around him. Lehrer, his old teacher, would have smacked him on the back of the head for such a mistake, pointing out that it could cost him his life. Now it was time to find out if the old man had been right.

  “Stand and deliver!” a leaf-swaddled man standing in front of Olsen’s mount said. “Make
a false move, and we will knock your mounts from beneath you.”

  “What scurvy fools—?” Pegleg started. Olsen cut him off with a curt wave of his long, thin fingers.

  “Faith, we don’t know how we get ourselves into these things, but,” he sighed, “we know how to get us out.” The wizard pointed at the one who’d spoken, assuming him to be the leader of the group they faced. “You. What god would you like to pray to before we strike you dead?”

  The man stood silent for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. He stood tall enough to look Olsen’s horse in the face, and the sword he bore danced lightly in his hand as he spoke. “You are a man of great bravado,” he said with a wide grin. “I like that.” He gestured wide with his sword. “Sadly, it will do you no good. Do I need to point out that we have you surrounded and outnumbered?”

  Dunk noticed Cavre’s head nodding as he finished tallying up the opposition. “They have nineteen men on their side,” he said. “We are but nine.”

  A flash like a bolt of lightning filled the air, followed by painful crack of thunder. The blackened outline of the outlaw who’d been standing in Olsen’s path stood there for a moment before crumbling into a steaming pile of ash.

  “Right,” the wizard said. “Now it’s only two to one. Do those seem like fair odds, lads?”

  “Robin!” a tubby man carrying a worn quarterstaff cried, shrugging off his mantle of leaves to reveal his shaven head. He gaped at the low pile of the robber’s remains and shook, although with rage or fear Dunk could not tell.

  “You killed him!” said a large man who stood nearly as tall as M’Grash. He stretched back his bowstring and pointed an arrow the size of a branch at Olsen’s heart.

  “And we’ll do the same to the lot of you unless you let us pass,” Olsen growled. “None dare threaten our life without tasting death themselves.”