Instead, his temper got the better of him. As Lehrer had called it, “the red veil” dropped over his eyes, and the next thing he knew he was pounding at his brother’s face with both fists, as hard as he possibly could.
Just before Dunk struck back, he heard Dirk whisper something like, “I’m sorry.” But it was too late. When Dunk launched himself off the bar and smashed into his brother, the time for words, for apologies, was over.
Dirk raised his arms to fend off Dunk’s fists. Frustrated by his inability to hurt his brother, Dunk lowered his shoulder and charged into him instead, sending him hurtling backward through the door by which he’d come. The two dwarf guards tried to stop them, but the one who managed to get a hand on Dirk only got pulled along, leaving the other to gape after them.
Dirk slammed his brother into the long dining table in the centre of the Reavers’ private room. Half-empty steins of beer, stacks of dirty dishes, and bits of bones and other less sturdy foods went flying everywhere, splattering every person in the room.
The Reavers sitting at the table scattered as the brothers rolled across the table and through the remains of the meal. The veterans grabbed their beers as they backed away, leaving the rookies without a drink to enjoy during the brawl.
When the brothers finally came to a halt in the remnants of the roast boar, Dirk was somehow on top, and the Reavers let out a great cheer. This distracted Dirk, who glanced around at the others and flashed a sheepish grin.
Dunk flailed about until his hand fell upon a half-eaten haunch. He grabbed the bone by the end and swung it up hard against the side of Dirk’s head, knocking him off not only himself but the table too. The crowd booed at this, but a few brave veterans applauded Dunk’s resourcefulness.
Dunk leapt off the table to see Dirk scrambling away from him, heading for a shuttered window on the opposite side of the room from where they’d come in. As Dirk reached the window, he turned around just in time for the charging Dunk to hit him with a two-armed tackle.
The two brothers crashed through the window and fell atop a dining table in another underground chamber below. The dwarfs eating there had been in the middle of a toast to the Colleges of Magic for bringing the lucrative Dungeonbowl to their land once again when the two men landed on their table, shattering its legs and crushing it to the floor.
“You’re mad!” Dirk said as the two crawled off the table in different directions, the wind momentarily taken from their sails. “You could have killed us!”
“I don’t have what it takes to kill,” Dunk wheezed bitterly as he staggered to his feet. “Remember?”
“I didn’t mean that,” Dirk puffed as he rose just as shakily. “I was mad.” He gulped for air a moment before continuing. “Spinne dumped me a few months back. She said she’d found someone else.”
“I didn’t know!” Dunk said. “I thought you were just team-mates.”
Dirk grabbed a stein from one of the stunned dwarfs and drained it as he stumbled toward an empty serving table sitting in front of a large window glazed with gold-tinted glass. “Then stopped bedding my damned team-mates!” Dirk raged.
From the room above, the Reavers roared their approval. A couple of smaller voices said, “Awww!”
Dirk smashed the stein on the smooth stone floor. “Forget it,” he said. “You can have the whore. I was through with her anyway.”
Dunk had been ready to call the fight done, but Dirk’s comment about Spinne stuck like a knife in his ear. He growled with mind-numbing anger and charged at Dirk again. This time, his younger brother was ready.
Dirk grabbed the oncoming Dunk by the shoulders and rolled backward, allowing Dunk’s momentum to send him flying toward the tinted window just beyond. Whilst Dunk was surprised at this manoeuvre, he managed to grab hold of Dirk through sheer determination, and refused to let go. As he smashed through the window and cascaded with the shattered glass into the open, sea air beyond, he hauled his brother with him.
A moment after they broke through the window, the two brothers looked around to see where they were.
In the distance, Dunk glimpsed the sun setting over the western side of the gulf, a red-orange orb that suddenly seemed like the entrance to some daemon-infested realm. He felt the wind rushing past his face as he and Dirk fell, and he saw the sunset-mirrored sea reaching up toward them like a sky toppling in the absolute wrong direction. He started to scream, and Dirk joined him in a horrified harmony that lasted until they blasted through the gulfs gleaming surface and into the frigid waters below.
Hitting the sea stunned Dunk for a moment, and the seawater threatened to race into his lungs, but he managed to hold his breath long enough to kick his way to the surface.
As Dunk broke back into the air, the first word from his lips was, “Dirk!” He whipped his head about, searching for any sign of his brother, even a floating body, but there was nothing there. He panicked for three long seconds before his younger brother burst through the waves in front of him, gasping for air and coughing up the sea.
Dunk swam over to his brother with three painful strokes and grabbed him underneath his arms. He held him there until he was done coughing and could breathe again.
“You all right?” Dirk said when he could finally talk again.
“Yeah,” Dunk said, relieved. “You?”
“Yeah.”
Dunk let his brother loose and the two of them started to swim toward the docks at the bottom of the cliff, only fifty yards away.
“Let’s never do this again,” Dirk said as they headed toward a swarm of dock workers who had seen them cascade into the chilly gulf.
“Deal,” said Dunk.
21
The next day, Dunk sat in the stands for the first Dungeonbowl game of the tournament, alongside Pegleg and about half of his teammates. His nose was red and raw from all his sneezing, and every bit of him was sore. Falling into the Black Gulf from a dozen storeys up was better than being tossed over the edge of the Spike! Magazine Tournament’s stadium, but not by much. And this time, he’d done it to himself.
“Mr. Hoffnung,” Pegleg said from where he sat behind Dunk. “I understand your brother won’t be able to start this game because of your fracas with him last night.”
Dunk hung his head in shame. “Damn,” he said softly. Then he felt a hook rest gently on his shoulder.
“Well done, Mr. Hoffnung,” the Hackers coach said. “I have a hundred crowns on the Champions of Death.”
Slick, who was sitting next to Dunk, smothered a cackle.
Dunk sighed and looked around at the large room in which they sat. They sat on hard, stone seats carved out of the rock in a stair-step fashion that allowed the people behind to see over the people in front of them. There was room for at least a thousand people in the room, maybe more, and the seats were rapidly filling up.
The crowd here seemed a bit more polite than the ones in Dunk’s last Blood Bowl game. Perhaps that was because the dwarfs charged exorbitant amounts for the few tickets left over after team representatives got their seats. On the way into the observation room, one dwarf had offered Dunk five hundred crowns for his place. Another had made him a far more disturbing proposition involving a pair of young dwarf ladies and a stick of limp celery.
The far wall of the room was smooth and flat, and covered with several images depicting the interior of a well-lit dungeon somewhere in the depths of Barak-Varr. It was a moment before Dunk realised that the images were more than perfectly lucid paintings. When he saw a squad of six Reavers in their blue and white uniforms appear in an image to the left, he realised these were Cabalvision pictures of what was happening in the dungeon at that moment.
Dunk looked up behind him. At the top of the room, a score of dwarfs fiddled with a set of crystal balls through which they somehow shone bright lights. The light passed through the balls and a set of lenses which somehow focused the images on the large wall, allowing all of the spectators to watch and cheer for the players at once.
&nb
sp; Six players dressed in the distinctive black uniforms of the Champions of Death appeared in an image on the right of the wall. These included a rotting mummy, a slavering vampire, a nasty wight, a hungry ghoul, a tottering zombie, and a ratling skeleton. As they appeared in the room, seemingly out of thin air, they grouped together into a horrifying huddle, their backs to the camra watching them.
Although Dunk had spent the past three months learning the fundamentals of Blood Bowl until they were second nature to him, he was mystified by what he saw. There was no field, no one had a ball, and the other images on the wall showed a series of rooms and passageways that had six identical chests scattered among them.
“What’s going on here?” Dunk asked Slick.
“Do you really want to know?” Slick said. “You’re not going to play. You just have to sit back and enjoy.”
“My brother might end up out there soon,” Dunk said, not mentioning that he’d seen Spinne among the Reavers already in the dungeon.
“The way you two fought yesterday, I’d have thought you wouldn’t care about his safety.”
Dunk just glared at the halfling.
Slick cleared his throat and put on his best instructor’s voice.
“Seventy-five years ago, the head wizards of the Colleges of Magic decided to resolve a long-running dispute by sponsoring a Blood Bowl tournament. Each of the ten colleges backed a team. The supporters of the winning team won the argument. The wizards liked it so much, they made it a regular event. So, here we are.” Slick smiled broadly.
Dunk stared at him. “That’s it?”
“Ah, so you want the whole story? As you wish.” Slick cracked his knuckles before diving in again. He pointed at various images on the wall as he talked.
“Most Dungeonbowl games are just played in the Barak-Varr Bowl, an underground stadium complete with a regular field and stands. This year is a special occasion because we’re playing under the classic Dungeonbowl rules, which haven’t been used for decades.
“You see where the two teams are right now?” The halfling pointed at the images to the far right and left of the wall, where the representatives from both the Reavers and the Champions of Death milled about. “Those are the two end zones. Each room has only one way in or out of it, so getting in can be a real battle. The real poser is that the players have to find the ball first.
“You see those chests scattered about the place?” Slick said, pointing them out as he went. “There are six scattered throughout the dungeon. The ball is in one of them.”
Dunk rubbed his chin. “What’s in the other chests?” he said suspiciously.
Slick clapped Dunk on the shoulder proudly. “Now you’re thinking like a Dungeonbowl player! They’re trapped, of course.”
“Trapped?”
Slick nodded. “Nothing in them but explosives. They make a good, little boom when you lift the lid.”
Dunk shook his head in disbelief. “So, five times out of six, the chest blows up in your face.”
“See, there’s the fun of it!”
Dunk goggled at the halfling. “If you’re sitting here watching, maybe. They must go through dozens of players.”
“Not quite. The first team to score a touchdown wins the game. Also, the dwarfs know their explosives. Some of the players who open the wrong chests don’t even have to be carried off the field.” Noticing Dunk’s look of disbelief, Slick added, “Son, it can’t be any worse than having an ogre hit you, right?”
Dunk nodded along with that. Even the few times M’Grash had blocked him in practice had been enough for him to pause to rethink his recent career choice.
“How do they pass the ball with those low ceilings?” Dunk asked. As a thrower, he figured this was something he should know.
“They bounce it off the walls, believe it or not. Wait until you see it!”
Dunk looked back at Pegleg for help, but his coach just looked down at him. “If the game bothers you so much, Mr. Hoffnung, perhaps you should thank Nuffle that we couldn’t find a sponsor. The Colleges of Magic each select a team packed with members of certain races. The Grey Wizards favour humans, and they chose the Reikland Reavers this year, just as they usually do.”
Dunk turned back to watch the images moving on the wall. “So unless we can prove we’re better than the Reavers, we’ll never get to play in the Dungeonbowl.”
“Or unless something happens to them,” said Slick.
Dunk shot him a dirty look.
“What?” the halfling said guiltlessly. “It’s a hard game. Things happen.”
“That’s my brother’s team,” Dunk said.
“Weren’t you trying to kill him yesterday yourself?”
“Just to beat him half to death,” Dunk snapped, letting his irritation with the topic show.
“Ah,” Slick said knowingly, “much better.”
Mercifully, a whistle blew at that moment, and the game began. “That’s the start of the game, folks,” said Bob’s voice. “The Reavers, led by catcher Spinne Schonheit, charge headlong into the dungeon. The Impaler leaps out in front of the Champions of Death, leaving ‘Rotting’ Rick Bupkiss and Matt ‘Bones’ Klimesh behind to protect the end zone.”
“This is going to be a real bloodletter of a game, Bob,” said Jim’s voice, “at least if the Champs get their way. None of them have blood of their own to spill!”
A flash of light on one of the images caught Dunk’s eye, and he saw Spinne appear in the middle of a room.
“What happened there?” he asked Slick. “With Spinne?”
“She stepped on the teleport pads in the room next to the Reavers’ end zone. It’s risky — some players who do it don’t show up again for a few days — but it can really pay off.” The halfling pointed up at Spinne. “See, she jumped three rooms ahead of where she was, and she ended up right near a chest.”
“And that’s paying off?”
“Wait until she opens the chest to see.”
In the image in the centre of the wall, Spinne leaned over and grabbed the handle on the front of the chest. After taking a deep breath, she flung it wide.
A blast of noise and light knocked Spinne off her feet. For a moment, Dunk held his breath, his heart stopped too. But then Spinne staggered back up, holding her head. After a moment, she snarled and raced straight back toward the glowing circle on the floor that Dunk realised was the teleport pad.
Spinne blinked away, and Dunk snapped his head back to look at the room from which she’d originally come. She wasn’t there.
“She disappeared!” Dunk choked.
“No, son,” Slick said, pointing off toward the right. “There she is.”
Dunk followed Slick’s finger to see Spinne appear in the middle of another room. The ghoul and wight playing for the Champions of Death were here, and they immediately charged toward Spinne.
“How?” Dunk asked. “Ouch!” he said involuntarily as Spinne slammed the wight back into the ground. The ghoul, though, grabbed her and repaid the favour.
“Oh, that’s going to leave a mark in the morning!” Bob’s voice said.
“If she survives that long,” Jim’s voice chipped in. “Gilda ‘the Girly Ghoul’ Fleshsplitter looks hungry. I hear their coach, the legendary necromancer Tomolandry the Undying, has been starving them for days!”
Spinne got to her knees and ploughed the grey-skinned ghoul back into the teleporter pad. The creature disappeared in a flash of light. With a quick look around to see that there were no chests in this room, Spinne raced off through the door to the east.
“The teleporter pads move people at random,” Slick said. “They aren’t linked in matched pairs. If you step on one, you could end up on any other, or nowhere at all.”
Dunk saw flashes at both ends of the wall. “What’s happening there?” he asked. He saw a new player appear in each end zone.
“That’s how the players get into the dungeon,” Slick said. “Each team’s dugout has a teleporter pad too, but this one is matched t
o a spot in their end zone. The coaches can feed in new players one at a time, as fast as the teleporter will work.”
Dunk shook his head. “Doesn’t that make for a pretty crowded game?”
Slick smiled. “It makes for mayhem, son. Beautiful mayhem.” The spectators roared as an undead player opened another chest that exploded in his face. Slick gestured all around him. “You have to give the people what they want!” he shouted.
Suddenly a loud noise erupted from the images on the wall. The players in the dungeon all looked up for a moment. Several of them screamed in terror. There was a sickening rumbling noise. Then the wall went blank and bright, the white light from behind the crystal balls shining through nothing but clear glass.
“This is strange,” said Bob’s voice. “I haven’t seen light this bright in three hundred years!”
The crowd buzzed in confusion for a moment. Then, almost as one, all of the dwarfs jumped up and raced toward the exits. This left the visitors, guests, and members of the other teams — those who had bothered to show up to watch this match — milling about and wondering what had happened.
“What happened?” Dunk asked. Slick just shrugged. It was then that Dunk noticed that one of the images was still there on the wall, although it was pitch black.
Before the halfling could open his mouth, Bob’s voice rang out again. “Jim, Nuri Nottmeeson, the Dungeonbowl grounds manager, has just handed me a note. Oh! By all of Chaos’s craftiest gods, this is the darkest day in Dungeonbowl history!”
“Bob?” Jim’s voice had lost its traditional swagger. “Bob? What is it?”
“The dungeon the Reavers and Champions of Death were playing in has collapsed. I repeat, the dungeon has collapsed!”
22
That evening, Dunk tried to get into the Trip again, with Slick and M’Grash in tow, but the owner, a dour dwarf on the best of days, wouldn’t hear of it. “Have you not done enough damage around here?” he growled.
[Blood Bowl 01] - Blood Bowl Page 17