[Blood Bowl 02] - Dead Ball

by Matt Forbeck - (ebook by Undead)

  “You’re the great wizard around here. Can’t you do something about it?”

  “Aye, lad, we could,” Olsen said, deadly serious now. “But we won’t.”

  “What?” Dunk nearly dropped the cup.

  “We could stop all this in an instant, cure the disease in even the worst of the cultists, and make everyone sing camp songs together all night long — if we wanted to. But we’d have to drink our own blood from that cup you’re carrying.”

  Dunk’s jaw dropped. “You’re too much of a coward to face death to save thousands of people?”

  “More like we don’t give enough of a damn about them. If it comes down to us or them, well, it looks like it’s us.”

  Dunk goggled at the wizard. “When we found you, you were ready to kill yourself as soon as you could.”

  “Aye, we were. Ironic, isn’t it? We suppose it’s one thing to talk tough about it when it seems it could never happen.”

  Olsen’s wand appeared in his hand. “And don’t you go getting any bright ideas about making us change our mind. You’re a good lad, Dunk, and we’d hate to see you get incinerated.”

  Dunk held the cup between him and the wizard. “You wouldn’t dare. You might destroy the cup.”

  Olsen snorted at this. “That wee cup is far tougher than you give it credit for. You can bust off the base like you’ve already done, and still it works. You can try to break the bowl, but it can’t be done, not by man nor god.”

  The wizard nodded proudly at the aghast Dunk. “When we work magic, lad, it’s built to last.”

  Dunk glared at the wizard. He only saw one option left, but he couldn’t imagine how he might pull it off, and with each tick of the clock more and more people died — including, maybe, Dirk, Lästiges, M’Grash, Edgar, Guillermo, and even Spinne.

  Then Slick hurled himself at the wizard. “Get him, son!” the halfling said as he wrapped his arms around Olsen’s leg. “We’ll force him to drink his own blood!”

  The wizard swung his fist down and smacked Slick in the nose. The halfling spun backward and landed in a corner of the dugout. When he looked back, Dunk saw blood dripping from his face.

  Dunk stepped toward Olsen, bringing up the cup to brain the wizard, but Olsen raised his wand and pointed it straight at him. “Ah-ah-ah, lad. Don’t think you can catch me out so—”

  A helmet smashed into the side of Olsen’s head, one of the spikes on the crest catching him in the temple. He slid to the floor, dead before his skull cracked against it. Cavre stood over him, the helmet’s faceguard still in his hand.

  “Sadly, that will not be permanent,” the catcher said, examining his handiwork. “Unless we manage to destroy the cup before he rises again.”

  “Oh, the humanity!” Jim’s voice rang out.

  “Don’t forget the dwarves, elves, orcs, ogres, goblins, skaven — oh, hell with it! It’s a bloodbath out there!” Bob said in a voice raw with emotion. Then, quieter: “Makes me miss the old days that much more.”

  “So how can we destroy it?” Dunk said. “Any ideas?”

  Slick shrugged. Cavre grimaced. Pegleg whistled innocently.

  “What, coach?” Dunk said suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “Well,” Pegleg said, wincing, “I hate to even mention it, but Olsen did suggest that, if someone whose soul was attached to the cup drank his own blood from it, well, that would destroy the cup.”

  “I think we’re clear on that, Pegleg,” Slick said.

  “By ‘someone’, I think he may have meant ‘anyone’,” Pegleg said. “Including me.”

  Dunk’s eyes flew wide. “You can do that? Stop all this? What’s the holdup?”

  Cavre spoke low and serious. “But, captain, won’t that kill you?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Pegleg said, shaking his head. “I won’t live forever anymore, I suppose, but I’m not yet on borrowed time like Mr. Merlin here. He may crumble to dust, but I think I’d be just fine.”

  Dunk stared at the ex-pirate. “So what’s stopping you?”

  Pegleg sucked at his teeth before he spoke. “The answer to your dreams doesn’t come along every day, does it? Immortality and an unbeatable team? That’s a dynasty built on a winning streak that could last forever.”

  Cavre put a hand on Pegleg’s shoulder. “Captain,” he said, “where’s the challenge in all that?”

  Pegleg bowed his head for a moment, then doffed his yellow tri-corn and came back up with a rueful smile. “Mr. Cavre, I can always count on you to set my sails in the right direction.”

  With that, Pegleg drew the cutlass he always kept at his side. At a nod of his head, Carve pulled back the man’s sleeve on his maimed arm, exposing the skin beneath. In a swift, sharp move, Pegleg drew the blade across his arm, and then held it over the bowl of the cup, which Dunk held under his wound.

  The coach’s blood dripped from his arm and pooled in the bottom of the cup. When it seemed like there was enough, Cavre used some gauze from the kit of the missing apothecary to bind the cut and stop the bleeding. Meanwhile, Dunk raised up the cup and helped Pegleg bring it to his lips.

  “Prepare yourself, my friends,” the coach said. “This could be one hell of a squall.”

  Dunk tipped the cup up, and Pegleg drank deep from it, swallowing every last drop.

  Dunk lowered the cup, and the ex-pirate licked the blood from his lips. For a moment, nothing happened. Then Pegleg opened his mouth and belched.

  “I beg your pardon,” the coach started to say, but before the word “beg” had left his tongue, the cup began to glow.

  Pegleg stared at it and said, “I think, Dunk, you might want to get rid of that as quickly as possible.”

  Dunk leapt up the dugout’s steps and looked for some place to put the cup where it had the least chance of hurting someone. Since the centre of the field was empty, he hurled it there. It bounced once on the midfield line, then rolled a short way before coming to a rest. With each passing second, it glowed brighter and brighter, until it became difficult to look at directly.

  “Well, that’s one way to get rid of a cursed trophy,” Bob said. “In most parts of the stadium, leaving something like that on the ground wouldn’t last—”

  The cup exploded, and the noise drowned out everything else in the stadium. The force of the blast knocked Dunk to the back wall of the dugout, and for a moment everything went black.

  When Dunk’s vision cleared, he saw that everyone else had been knocked down but was unharmed. He stood up to peer out onto the field and saw a massive crater where the cup had last been. Out in the stands, the fans seemed mostly unhurt, slowly picking themselves up and dusting themselves off.

  “Congratulations, Mr. Merlin,” Pegleg said solemnly. Dunk turned to see him poking the tip of his cutlass through the wizard’s robes, which lay in a pile of ancient dust. “You finally got your wish.”

  “Nuffle’s leathery balls!” Jim said. “Have you ever seen anything so appalling in your life? Bob? Bob, where are you?”

  Dunk poked his head out of the dugout to gaze up at the Jumboball looming over the stadium. The image in it panned over the higher sections of the south side of the stadium.

  Only a few people stood there: a handful of Reavers, a few more fans, all of them drenched in blood. Dunk saw Edgar and M’Grash towering over the others. The camera pulled in tight on one particular Reaver who carried someone in his arms: Dirk and Lästiges for sure. But where was Spinne?

  Dunk dashed out of the dugout and leapt on top of it so he could get a clear view at the stands above. “Spinne!” he shouted. “Spinne!” But he was too far away for anyone in that area to hear.

  Then M’Grash turned around, and Dunk spotted Spinne still hanging from his back. His heart jumped back up out of the bottom of his boots and lodged itself in his throat. He vaulted over the restraining wall that kept the fans off the field and charged straight up to her, taking care not to slip in the gore as he went.

  “We have some good news, Blood B
owl fans! Our roving reporter not only survived her kidnapping but is in the centre of that amazing mess down there. Lästiges, what can you tell us about what happened up there?”

  The image in the Jumboball switched to show Lästiges and Dirk locked in a deep, probing kiss. It took her a moment to realise she was on camra, but when she did she pulled back from Dirk and flashed the viewers a winning grin. “Hi, Jim!” she said. “It’s good to be back on the air.”

  Dirk set Lästiges down gently, and the camra pulled back. “It seems that the incident here in the stands was started by a cult of Nurgle related to the one in Albion’s Sure Wood, to provide a distraction so that their agents on the Hackers could steal the legendary Far Albion Cup. Little did we know how tightly their fate was tied to that of the trophy itself. When the cup exploded, so did every one of the cultists infected with the dread disease they passed among themselves. Sadly, they managed to infect a number of the fans during the game, too, along with a few of the Reavers who gallantly came to my rescue. Those brave souls were lost as well.”

  “Thanks for that update, Lästiges. Um, you haven’t seen Bob anywhere down there, have you?”

  The camra panned to the right and focused on a vampire with thick sunglasses and slicked-back hair, dressed in a Wolf Sports jacket. He knelt in the bleachers, scooping the blood from the benches and into his mouth in wild handfuls. When he noticed the camra was on him, he turned toward it and smiled, showing his vicious fangs, and said, “It just doesn’t get any better than this!”

  When Dunk reached Spinne, she slid down from M’Grash’s back and landed in his arms. He started to say something to her — he wasn’t sure what — but she kissed him long and hard instead. He responded in kind, and it was a long time before anyone dared to interrupt.

  “It’s like kissing your sister,” Slick said.

  Dunk chuckled loud and long as he sat at the same, familiar table in the Skinned Cat again. It had been a long time since he’d felt free enough to enjoy a laugh like that. He put his arm around Spinne, who giggled too, and leaned over to the halfling and said, “Like kissing your sister, maybe.”

  “You leave Loretta out of this,” Slick said. “You know what I’m saying. A draw! A tie! In the blasted Blood Bowl finals!”

  “Well, we only had five players left,” said Dunk. “And so did the Reavers.”

  “So? You keep playing. Neither of those numbers are zero.”

  “And there was that huge crater in the middle of the field.”

  “That just makes the game more interesting.”

  “And all those dead people in the stands.” Dunk peered into his friend’s eyes, looking for a hint of compassion. He knew it was there, just as he also knew that Slick didn’t want to show it.

  “Professionals never let what happens in the stands—” The halfling scowled. “Ah, forget it. It’s over and done with, I suppose.”

  “We’ll get you next year,” Dirk said around Lästiges, who sat curled up in his lap. “You were just lucky this time.”

  “Lucky?” Dunk gaped. “You call ending up in possession of a cursed trophy that nearly gets you killed time and time again ‘lucky’?”

  “It got you into the championship game, didn’t it?” Lästiges said with a grin.

  Dunk sighed. “Hey,” he said to Dirk, “you never told me what happened with Lehrer.”

  “Got away,” Dirk said around a sip of his beer. “He’s like a ghost when it comes to hiding in this city.”

  “Think he’s serious about the Guterfiends putting a price on my head now?”

  “Do you really have to ask?”

  Dunk rolled his eyes.

  “Well,” Slick said, “it’s a good thing we’re headed back to Bad Bay tomorrow then. We’re ten players short of a full squad again, and the Spike! Magazine Tournament is coming up just around the corner.”

  “Ten?” Dunk said. “There’s only M’Grash, Carve, Guillermo, Edgar, and me left. That’s five. We need eleven?”

  Slick arched his eyebrows at Dunk and then at Spinne. “You haven’t told him yet?”

  Dunk’s heart stopped. “Told me what?”

  “Meet my newest client,” the halfling said. “I just got her a new contract with—”

  “I’m playing with the Hackers!” Spinne said, her eyes sparkling.

  Dunk’s jaw fell open, and he stared at Spinne as if she’d just sprouted horns from her head.

  “What?” she said. “You’re not happy?”

  “No,” Dunk said, shaking his head. “To say it like Edgar would, I’m bloody ecstatic!” He leapt to his feet and dipped Spinne back in his arms for a long, lingering kiss.

  All of the pain and horrors of the year melted away from Dunk in that moment. Thoughts of Deckem and his deadmen, of diseased cultists, of vampire orcs out for revenge, and even of the Guterfiends and their unknown plots all faded from his mind. As his lips parted from Spinne’s, he looked deep into her eyes and said, “This is going to be the best year ever.”

  Scanning, formatting and basic

  proofing by Undead.