Table of Contents

Cover

Blood Bowl – Extract

Legal

eBook license

One

Dunk Hoffnung hated his life, or what little he thought might be left of it. He hadn’t always felt this way. In his youth, in Altdorf, he’d led the kind of sheltered life that only wealth and privilege could provide. As the eldest heir to the massive Hoffnung fortune, he’d lived far above the squalor of the ghettoes of his hometown. Back then, he’d been mostly and happily ignorant of the kind of existence the vast bulk of the population scratched out in the shadow of his family’s towering keep.

Then everything had gone wrong.

‘No one ever made a fortune without making a few enemies,’ Dunk’s father, Lügner, liked to say. He’d repeated it often enough that Dunk felt comfortable ignoring it. After all, he’d reached twenty-three years of age without ever having tripped over that particular dictum. Then it reached out and bloodied his nose.

So, scant months after his family’s fall from grace, Dunk found himself clambering up the side of the forsaken pile of rubble called Mount Schimäre, bent on doing something to redeem his name and, by some extension on which he wasn’t quite clear, that of his family.

Here in the Grey Mountains, right on the edge of the Empire and more than a hundred miles from his old life, the sky looked different, colder somehow, more distant. It was still all part of the same world though. Perhaps it was he that had changed.

Dunk was still tall, graceful and strong; the benefits of the best trainers in the arts of war and athletics that his family’s gold crowns could buy. His hair was jet black, and he’d had to have it cropped short to keep it from snarling and falling into his eyes. He’d lost his fine silver combs along with everything else when his family had been run out of their home. His eyes were still the penetrating silver of a bright, full moon. They saw the same things as before, but the man behind them had changed.

Dunk’s boot slipped on the gravel of the trail up to the creature’s lair, snapping him out of his thoughts. Self-pity would do him no good here. No matter how much he might think he deserved death, he was determined to make the dragon at least work for it.

The people of Dörfchen had warned him against taking this path. ‘Fear not, good people,’ he’d told them. ‘By tonight, you will no longer shiver in the shadows of the foul beast that has terrorised your hamlet for so long.’

They’d just laughed and sent him on his way. At the town’s only public house, the Crooked Arrow, they’d been happy to tip a pint or three in his direction for his efforts. Old Gastwirt, the innkeeper, had even stood Dunk the price of a bottle of brandy as a sign of support. ‘You can pay me for it when you return,’ he’d said.

The inn’s common room had fallen uncomfortably silent at those words. Gastwirt’s own laugh had caught in his throat, but he’d still managed to hand Dunk the earthenware bottle with the red wax seal still intact over the cork.

Dunk had made good use of the bottle on the road to the dragon’s cave. The spirits tasted like they’d been fermented in casks tainted with warpstone, the shards of coagulated Chaos that spawned the mutants that were rumoured to teem beneath the streets of the Empire’s cities. Even the smell of the stuff made his head swim, but Dunk needed something to stoke the guttering fires of his courage. In that respect, the foul liquid served all too well.

Dunk hadn’t realised how much he’d had to drink until the trail into the mountains had become so bad that he’d had to dismount from Pferd, his faithful stallion, a fine beast with a coat and mane as black as Dunk’s hair and a cantankerous attitude to match. Only two steps out of his stirrups, the hopeful hero found the earth tilting under his feet, sending him tumbling back down the slope until he lodged in a gnarled buckthorn bush that brought him sharply to his senses.

Now, here, only steps away from the steaming mouth of the dragon’s cave, Dunk’s head started swimming again. His heart hammered so hard that he was amazed that it didn’t knock against the inside of his armour’s shimmering breastplate, announcing his presence to the creature within. His hand went to the hilt of his sword, and the earthenware bottle clanked against it, causing him to jump.

Dunk looked down at his hand as if the bottle had suddenly grown out of it. Then he pulled the cork from it again with his teeth and took one last belt for good measure. As he did, he wondered if the beast he sought could spit gouts of fire from its gullet. At thatmoment, Dunk felt maybe he could match that feat.

Dunk pressed the cork back into the bottle and put it down at his feet. If he survived the day, he promised himself to finish it in the victory celebration the grateful people of Dörfchen would no doubt throw for him. Otherwise, he hoped the next worthy hero who happened along might use it to toast his memory.

Finally faced with the objective of his quest, the lair of the beast whose blood he hoped to spill and thereby wash clean his sins, Dunk drew his sword and opened his mouth to speak. Though before a sound escaped his lips, he stopped cold.

Try as he might, Dunk could not think of what to do. The honourable thing, from the heroic stories on which he’d been weaned, would be to announce his presence and call the dread beast forth to impale itself on his blade. That had been what he’d intended to do once he first heard of this damnable creature, but in the clarity of the moment – such clarity as he could find with his head swimming as it was – that seemed like nothing less than sheer folly.

‘Perhaps I should poke around a bit first,’ Dunk said to himself, louder than he’d intended. When no winged fury came screaming out of the cave to answer his slip, he nodded to himself and crept forward as quietly as he could.

Dunk’s armour clinked and clanked so much as he moved that he felt he might as well be wearing a set of cymbals, to announce him like a visitor to a foreign court. The old stories he had once been so fond of, no matter how foolish they seemed now as he peered into the darkening cave, told of the deep slumbers in which dragons waited between snacking on their yearly virgins, and he fervently hoped that at least this part of the tales might be true.

As Dunk shuffled further into the cave, he realised that he had forgotten to bring something with him to light his way. He had some torches back in his saddlebags, but those were with Pferd.

Dunk gazed behind him to the west and saw the sun dipping toward the canopy of the wide forest beyond. He knew that if he went back for a torch it would be pitch black before he could return to the cave. While the thought of putting off his destiny for another day appealed to him, he couldn’t bear the thought of returning to the Crooked Arrow to spend the night. He feared that the tales the townspeople would surely repeat about the dragon would force his will from him for good and send him off to another part of the Empire in search of easier means of penance.

Instead, Dunk sheathed his sword, trotted back to the earthenware bottle, and snatched it up. Then he removed the red silk scarf he’d worn around his neck every day since young Lady Helgreta Brecher had given it to him nearly a year ago. At the time, he’d treasured the gift from his betrothed as his most valued possession. Now, his arranged marriage was nothing more than a bittersweet memory and the scarf was little more than a reminder of how far he’d fallen. It was only fitting then, that it help light the path to his redemption.

Dunk uncorked the bottle and stuffed the end of the scarf into it with the barest tinge of regret. The contrast between the finery of the scarf and the crudity of its new home struck him as appropriate, although he couldn’t say how. Then he pulled his tinderbox from his pocket and struck a fire on the scarf’s free end.

Carrying the makeshift light high in his left hand, Dunk drew his sword again with his right. As he entered the cave, the light from his bottle-lamp showed that the interior cavern was much larger than its mouth implied. It seemed to go back and down forever, disappearing into blackness beyond his light’s reach.

The wind whistling past him like something alive, Dunk moved further into the cave. When he realised he couldn’t see the walls to either side of him, he started to panic. He clink-clanked as quietly as he could over to his right until he reached the comfort of the wall there, then walked along again, hugging it close.

As Dunk crept further into the cave, the sound of the wind breathing through the cave’s mouth fell behind him. He found the silence strangely comforting, although the nothingness it implied put him on edge. Where was the pile of gold and gems on which the great beast had made its bed? Or maybe that part of the stories was wrong too. But where was the beast itself?

Perhaps the dragon was out hunting, terrorizing another village elsewhere in the mountains. Could it be plotting evil ends with some fiend of Chaos in the Forest of Shadows that lay on the other side of these rough, high peaks?

It was then that Dunk tripped over the pile of bones.

He’d thought the first of them was some kind of rippling formation in the rocks, possibly formed by the heat of the dragon’s fiery breath over the centuries. He’d stepped right on them, and they rolled beneath his feet like the smoothed logs on which the young Dunk once watched dwarf labourers draw battered ships out of the River Reik and into Altdorf’s legendary dry-docks. He spilled forward and found himself unable to control his fall, rolling along on more and more of the brownish, flesh-stripped things until he came to a clattering halt in a heap of skeletal remains in which he could have buried a mountain bear.

Dunk thrashed about in the mound of bones for a moment, crunching them under his armoured bulk. It flashed through his head that the bones were alive, grabbing at him, trying to pull him down to share their communal grave. When he finally stopped smashing them down though, he realised the only threat they posed to him was that he might stab himself on one of the broken ends he’d created.

Throughout the fall, Dunk had managed to keep aloft his left arm and hold on to his makeshift torch. He’d dropped his blade somewhere in the process, but was pleased that he had held on to the bottle-lamp so well. He could use that to find the sword, but if he’d kept the sword instead of the light he might never have been able to find his way out of the cave.

Dunk cursed his luck as he scrambled to his feet, shards of bone falling from his armour.

‘Only I could find the lair of a missing dragon,’ he said. As the words left his lips, relief washed over him. He’d done his duty, faced up to his fears, and everything had come out all right. He was still alive.

Dunk wasn’t sure just how he felt about that. He’d been robbed of a chance to earn fortune and glory, after all, but the thought that he’d traded that for a reprieve from all-but-certain death tempered his regret.

He brought the light closer to the bones. There had to be dozens of skeletons here, representing most of the peoples of the Old World. Many of them clearly had once belonged to humans. Others displayed the short, stout frame of dwarfs, and a few more were even smaller, either those of halflings or – the thought made Dunk shudder – children. One set of long, thin bones convinced him that the dragon must have once made a rare snack of a wood elf too. He pulled his sword from beneath its delicate ribcage.

Something grated on Dunk’s nerves, and for a while he blamed it on the bones arrayed around him. He imagined the voices of all these doomed souls crying out to him for vengeance, and he grimaced at the thought that he had no idea where to find their killer.

The silence of the cave finally grabbed Dunk’s attention. The noise from the wind had stopped.

Unnerved, Dunk stepped from the rattling pile of bones and made his way back towards the exit. As he drew closer, he grew concerned. The day’s dying light that had streamed in through the cave’s mouth wasn’t where he thought it should be. Had his sense of direction become confused by his spill? He considered going back and trying to retrace his steps again when he saw the darkness shift before him.

Dunk’s breath caught in his chest. He realised that one problem with wandering through a dark cave with a light was that creatures could see you long before you could see them.

The hissing noise that stabbed from the darkened region between Dunk and the exit nearly made him leap from his armour. The serpentine head that followed it, striking into the glow of his bottle-lamp’s light, shocked him in a different way. The head was long and thin, mounted on a snakelike neck, but he had expected something much larger. He almost giggled in relief.

Before he could finish his thought, an angry bleat filled the cave. A goat? In here? Had the dragon been out hunting and brought back the poor beast for its evening’s repast? Dunk saw the outline of the billy goat’s horns stretching out on the edge of the darkness. It wasn’t a fair damsel, he knew, but he could still hope to save it from joining the other bones in the back of the cave. Here, at last, was a chance for him to do someone – or rather something – some good.

Dunk’s hopes for gratitude vanished like an arrow fired into the night when a deep growl reverberated throughout the cave. He snapped his head about, searching for the source of this new threat. Then the face of a lion poked into the light next to the serpent’s head, on the other side from the goat.

The configuration of faces confused Dunk, and he stood stock still, staring at them as though they were a living puzzle that would somehow solve itself. And then it did.

The creature moved forward towards the would-be hero, into the makeshift lamp’s light as it guttered in the face of its three breathing heads. Its leonine front paws scraped at the cave’s rocky floor, as if it were sharpening the wicked claws before launching an attack. It unfurled its greasy, bat-like wings, which were wide enough to fill the cavern, brushing them against the opposing walls. Its tail, like something that should have been attached to a gargantuan scorpion, curled forward between the wings, small flashes on the tip convincing Dunk that even this appendage had eyes. As its three heads, and its tail, glared at the intrepid fool who had dared invade its home, the chimera clopped and scraped its hoofed hindquarters like a bull preparing to charge.

Two

Dunk edged backwards as the creature came towards him, but it matched him step for step. As he moved, he spoke. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said to the creature, hoping it might somehow be able to understand him. ‘I was looking for a dragon.’

The goat-head snorted.

‘You come from Dörfchen,’ the snake-head hissed. It spoke the Reikspiel tongue of the Empire flawlessly, although with an oddly familiar accent that Dunk identified as hailing from distant Kislev.

The lion-head uttered a curious growl. ‘You’re earrrrly,’ it said.

Dunk could have sworn the lion-head smiled. ‘You… you were expecting me?’ he stammered. He hefted his sword, testing its weight, just as he had before every sparring match against his trainers back in Altdorf. He’d never been in a real, to-the-death fight and he hoped they’d taught him well. This time there would be no mercy, he was sure, only blood.

‘Our last sssacrifissse was not ssso long ago,’ said the snake-head.

‘It’s a booonus,’ the goat-head said. ‘Our reputation grooows.’

‘Yessss,’ the snake-head said. ‘It drawsss usss fresssh victimsss.’

‘Frrresh meat!’ the lion-head said.

‘Ah,’ Dunk said. He had wondered why the villagers had been so eager to point out the location of this ‘dragon’s’ lair to him. Old Gastwirt had even offered to draw him a map. Now it was clear. They depended on foolhardy heroes like himself to find their way up here regularly to make their regular ‘sacrifices’ to their local menace. In return, the creature left the hamlet alone. No wonder they’d been so friendly and free with such a total stranger.

‘I’m afraid there’s been a mistake,’ Dunk said as his heart sunk into his boots. ‘I wasn’t sent up here as your next meal.’

‘Explaaain!’ the goat-head said. The lion-head snapped its jaws to punctuate the demand.

Dunk swallowed hard. ‘The kind and dedicated people of Dörfchen,’ he said, ‘fear that you might be… tiring of your standard fare. They sent me up here to take your order for your upcoming repast.’

The three heads looked at each other, mystified.

Dunk continued, amazed that he could still speak and stunned at the words escaping his lips. ‘Would you prefer a virgin of some sort? Or perhaps a nice little goblin? I’m told we might even be able to procure a few snotlings, or perhaps a little gnoblar to chew on?’

Three sets of eyes narrowed at Dunk. As the light from his bottle-lamp began to die, he noticed that all six orbs glowed green with the crazed light of Chaos.

‘Of… of course, you can just stick with your standards.’

The lion licked its muzzle with a black, forked tongue.

‘I really do recommend the snotling though,’ Dunk said softly. ‘It’s much tastier than the hu-human.’ His voice trailed off as he finished.

‘Posssssibly,’ the serpent-head said as it weaved hypnotically back and forth, like a snake trying to turn the tables on an unwary charmer.

‘But you’rrre herrre,’ the lion-head growled.

‘Nooow,’ the goat-head bleated. With that, the great beast slouched forward.

As the lion-head leaped out towards Dunk, he slashed at it with his blade. The never-bloodied edge cut through the creature’s mane and trailed a splatter of blood in its wake. The lion-head yowled in pain and surprise, and the goat squealed in protest.

Emboldened by his success, Dunk brought his sword back for another swing. As he bought the blade forward, though, the snake-head darted out and struck the weapon from his hand. It sailed off behind him, and he heard it land clattering in the pile of what little was left of the chimera’s past victims. Dunk gawked for a moment at his empty hand, sure that his bones would soon join the others.

The trio of heads loosed terrifying laughs. The cacophony startled Dunk into action. He gripped hold of the only thing he had left, the barely burning bottle-lamp, and hurled it at the creature with all his might.

The earthenware bottle smashed into the creature right where its three heads met. Its noxious contents splashed across the chimera’s chest and necks, and burst into flames. The blaze blossomed against the chimera, and the three heads screamed in an unholy choir of fury and fear.

Dunk glanced back over his shoulder to where his sword had gone spinning away, but the back of the cave was shrouded in utter darkness. He’d have a better chance of finding a wishbone than his blade in that mess. Turning back towards the chimera, which was trying to beat out the flames engulfing each of the heads by banging them against each other, he realised there was only one way out of the cave: past that burning beast.

With a strength fortified by desperation, Dunk lowered his shoulder and charged directly at the monster. ‘Keep low and move through your foe,’ he heard Lehrer say, the old trainer’s voice echoing in his head. ‘The low man has control.’

Only this wasn’t a man that Dunk faced but a beast three times his size. Still, he hoped, the same principle should apply.

The fire had blinded the chimera, and it was turning away towards the cave’s entrance when Dunk barrelled into it. He caught it directly below one of its wings and knocked it sprawling into one of the cavern walls. Without stopping, he spun away from the creature, flinging himself around the beast and past it toward the twilight sky beyond.

Dunk was giddy with glee as he sprinted for the exit. If this experience had proved one thing to him, it was that he wasn’t ready to die quite yet, especially if it meant becoming a twisted abomination’s next meal.

As Dunk reached for freedom, though, something hard and sharp slammed into his back, its meaty tip stabbing through his armour and into the flesh beneath. Lights flashing before his eyes, Dunk tumbled forward, out of the cave, letting the force of the blow push him further from his foe.

When he finally came to a stop, Dunk scrambled to his feet and whipped about, fearful that the winged beast would come roaring out of the cave after him. From the trio of screams emanating from the flickering lights still flashing from the cavern mouth, he guessed that the beast was too busy saving its own life at the moment to finish taking his.

Dunk’s left arm was numb from the shoulder down and hung limp in its socket like a piece of meat. For a moment, he feared the blow might have severed the limb, but he checked with his good hand, and it was still there. He was wondering what was wrong with it when the numbness started to fade, only to be replaced with the excruciating sensation of a thousand fire ants biting into his wounded arm. His stomach flipped about like a dying fish pulled from its cool river home and slapped down on the cruel wood of a sun-warmed dock. He bent over and retched.

Wiping the remnants of his last meal from his mouth and soaked in the stench of the Dörfchen liquor that had tasted like embalming fluid as it erupted from his gullet, Dunk realised what had been done to him. Angry and nearly blind, the chimera had lashed out at him with its two-eyed tail and stung him with its venomous barb. He had escaped its lair, but it seemed that he could not outrun the effects of its wrath.

‘Never let it be said that I didn’t flee with the best of them,’ Dunk said to himself as he stumbled down the mountainside, wondering how he was going to be able to find his black horse as the last rays of daylight raced from the sky.

When Dunk came to, he found himself lying over the saddle of his horse, which was standing outside the Crooked Arrow. The night was fully dark now, although a light burned inside the place, visible through the cracks in the thick, but poorly fitted shutters that covered a window in the upper floor of the grey-plastered building.

Dunk slid from the back of Pferd and shook his head to clear the sheets of cobwebs that he felt had accumulated there. The brisk night air bit into his face and whistled through the hole in the back of his armour, poking him awake. He tested his arm and found that although it still hurt he could move it once again. The fire ants had apparently fled for a more hospitable home, one that didn’t have a chimera angry at it.

Dunk tripped forward and steadied himself against the inn’s scarred oaken door. It was quiet inside and dark but for the light above. It must have been late, the regulars had long since gone to bed. He knocked on the door and waited, listening.

In the room above, he heard a pair of voices, a man and a woman, arguing in hushed tones. Then the light went out.

Dunk knocked on the door again, louder this time. Only the crickets in the distance answered. He looked up and down the wide, unpaved road. The few other shops and houses that lined what could only charitably be called the centre of the hamlet were all dark too. The people who resided within them, resting easily in the shadow of the monster-infested mountain, another ‘sacrifice’ – Dunk, in this case – having recently been sent off to placate the neighbouring beast.

This time, Dunk banged on the door with all his might, his mailed fists making dents in the already battered, ironbound planks. ‘Open up!’ he shouted at the top of his lungs. ‘Open up, now!’

He’d been trying to help these ungrateful bastards, and they’d as good as sent him to a certain death. Somebody was going to pay.

‘Go away!’ a voice rasped down from above. Dunk looked up to see Gastwirt leaning out through the now-open shutters, his long hair like strings of greasy white cotton and his flimsy nightshirt, which barely covered his massive gut, fluttering in the breeze. ‘We’re closed for the night!’

‘You’ll open up for me, damn you!’ Dunk shouted up at the innkeeper, shaking his fist at the bewildered old man. ‘After what I’ve been through, I’ve earned the right to a warm bed tonight.’

Gastwirt squinted down at Dunk and then ducked back inside for a moment. When he reappeared, he held a lantern high in one arm, and he peered down again to see who might be so bold as to make such demands. ‘You!’ the innkeeper said, recoiling in horror as he recognised Dunk’s face. ‘You’re supposed to be dead!’

‘And you’re supposed to be an innkeeper!’ Dunk shouted back at Gastwirt. ‘Let me in, and give me a bed. I’m hurt!’ He rubbed his shoulder as he said this, wondering just how bad it was.

Gastwirt peered down at Dunk, suspicion etched on his doughy face. ‘How do I know you’re not a ghost come back for your revenge on our fair town?’ he asked. ‘No one else has ever returned from the creature’s cave alive.’

Dunk pulled off his right gauntlet and flung it at the innkeeper. The metal glove smacked Gastwirt right in his bulbous nose and then dropped back down to the ground where Dunk retrieved it.

‘Could a ghost do that?’ Dunk asked as the innkeeper howled in protest.

At that moment, the front door creaked open. Dunk stared into the darkness beyond, ready for a guard of some sort to spring from the shadows. He looked down and saw the small figure standing there framed in the doorway, barefooted, dressed in a grimy, once-white nightshirt and holding a small oil lamp.

For an instant, Dunk thought that the newcomer was a child with dark and curly hair, perhaps a son or grandson of Gastwirt’s, who’d been roused by the arguing. Then he noticed the traces of stubble on the little person’s chin and the wrinkles around his wide smile and dancing grey eyes.

‘Now, son, I ask you, is that any way to make a reasonable request of your host?’ the halfling said.

‘Morr’s icy breath!’ the innkeeper cursed above. ‘What are you–’ He leaned further out the window until he could see the halfling waving up at him from the inn’s threshold.

‘Shut that door!’ Gastwirt shouted before he disappeared back into the his bedchamber, slamming the shutters closed behind him as he went.

The halfling held out a hand of greeting towards Dunk and waved for him to come inside. ‘I’d hurry yourself in here quickly, son, before that walrus makes his way down those stairs. He’ll double bar the door for sure.’

Dunk reached back and wound Pferd’s reins around the hitching post outside the inn, then slipped in past the halfling while nodding his thanks.

‘I’m glad someone around here understands hospitality,’ he said. He stuck out his hand at the halfling. ‘I’m Dunk.’

‘Slogo Fullbelly,’ the halfling said, his hand almost disappearing within Dunk’s much larger mitt.

‘Slick, you stinking bastard!’ Gastwirt howled as he slipped down the last few stairs and fell onto his rump in the back of the room.

‘Slick, to my friends,’ the Halfling said in a confidential tone.

The innkeeper leaped to his feet far quicker than Dunk would have guessed the man’s bulk could allow. ‘You’ve no friends here, you sawed-off con artist,’ Gastwirt said, shaking a finger at Slick.

Dunk stepped between the innkeeper and the halfling before Gastwirt could wrap his thick paws around the little one. ‘He did me a good turn when you refused,’ he said to the innkeeper.

Gastwirt looked up at Dunk, just a hint of green haloing his face. ‘I don’t open the door for anyone I don’t know after dark,’ he said. ‘Not when I’ve sent everyone else home.’

Dunk stepped closer and glared down into the shorter man’s watery blue eyes. ‘I met you earlier today.’

‘And sallied off to certain death, just like all the others, sure that providence and your own sheer arrogance would let you rule the day, to kill–’ The innkeeper cut himself short. ‘By the gods’ grace and mercy,’ he said in awe, ‘did you actually kill the beast?’

Dunk grimaced, suddenly aware of how much his shoulder still hurt. ‘I made it back alive, but not unscathed.’

‘Ooh,’ Slick said from behind Dunk. The would-be hero turned and saw Slick standing on a nearby table, peering at his back. ‘That’s a mighty nasty-looking hole you have in your armour there, son,’ he said.

‘It’s nothing…’ Dunk started to say, but he couldn’t bring himself to finish. ‘It hurts like blazes,’ he conceded.

‘Allow me,’ Slick said, reaching up to unfasten the buckles that held Dunk’s breastplate and backplate in place.

‘You can’t do that here!’ Gastwirt complained. ‘I can’t have wounded strangers stumbling into my place in the middle of the night.’

Dunk growled at the man, then reached over and snatched a long, sharp spear from where it hung over the massive mantel in the room. He shoved its wicked, barbed tip towards the innkeeper and growled again, the pain from his sudden movements tainting his wordless threat with a dose of desperation.

‘I think, kind sir,’ Slick said to the innkeeper gravely, ‘that you’d better make friends with this man quickly if you don’t wish to find yourself thrown out of your own establishment.’

Gastwirt looked up into Dunk’s pained eyes. The warrior could see the thoughts whirring through the man’s brain as he weighed the risks of the various avenues of action open to him. Then the innkeeper’s shoulders sagged in resignation.

‘All right,’ said Gastwirt as he padded towards the open door and shoved it shut, then dropped two bars of solid, ironbound oak behind it. ‘Let’s be quick about this.’ The innkeeper returned, firing up a lantern that hung from the ceiling in the centre of the room.

‘Sit down, son,’ Slick said to Dunk, ‘and I’ll have a look at that trouble of yours.’

Dunk slumped in the chair nearest the table on which the halfling still stood. He yanked his breastplate and chestplate off with one hand, but when it came to slipping out of the mail shirt, he found it hurt too much. With a wave from Slick, Gastwirt ambled over and helped the halfling pull the damaged, bloodied armour off, as well as the undershirt beneath it.

The innkeeper gasped in horror at the sight of the puncture wound in Dunk’s back. Slick just clucked his tongue and ordered Gastwirt to hustle off to the kitchen and bring back a bucket of water and some clean rags. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ Slick told Dunk. ‘I’ve seen far worse.’

‘Are you a physician?’

The halfling chuckled. ‘Hardly, son. I’m a Blood Bowl player’s agent.’

Dunk turned and gave Slick an appraising look. ‘For which team?’ he asked.

‘I work for my player,’ Slick said. ‘Negotiate his contracts, defend his honour, get him as much time on the pitch as I can, for the most pay. Some agents handle a handful of different players all at once, but I prefer to concentrate on one star player at a time. That kind of dedication to personal service makes all the difference.’

‘Who’s your player?’

Slick looked over to where the dying embers still glowed soft and red in the inn’s fireplace. ‘I’ve had a lot of them over the years.’

‘Who is it now?’

Gastwirt burst back into the room right then, half a bucket of sloshing water in one hand and a fistful of grey, threadbare rags in the other. He set the things down on the table next to Slick, who took one of the rags and dipped it into the bucket.

As the halfling gently rubbed the wet rag around the area of Dunk’s wound, cleaning the blood away, he said, ‘Let’s just say I’m between clients at the moment. Blood Bowl is a dangerous game.’

‘I’ve never seen a match.’ Dunk suspected that Slick was talking so much just to distract him from how much the rag stung. Either way, he was willing to go along with it.

‘Really?’ Gastwirt said in excited disbelief. ‘If I’d lived in a big city, I’d go to the matches every week.’

‘I’ve never much seen the point of it,’ Dunk said, gritting his teeth as Slick rubbed more water into the wound. ‘A bunch of grown people – or dwarfs, or elves, or orcs, or ogres or worse – chasing a football around a field? Why bother?’

‘Because,’ Slick said as he dried Dunk’s shoulder and wrapped it with another rag, ‘it pays better than thievery.’ As he finished up, he patted Dunk on the shoulder and handed him back his bloodstained undershirt. ‘Besides, people who go off looking to pick fights with dragons shouldn’t speak ill of the career choices of others.’

‘I’ll take that under consideration,’ Dunk said.

‘You’re a lucky man,’ Slick said as he slid down off the table and picked up his candle from where he’d left it. ‘The poison of a sting like that can be fatal.’

As the words left Slick’s mouth, Dunk’s head started to spin again. ‘I just wish I was dead.’

‘Let’s get this boy a bed,’ Slick said to Gastwirt.

‘Right away,’ the innkeeper nodded. He led Dunk to a door in the back corner of the common room. It opened onto a private quarters little larger than one of the closets in the family keep in which Dunk had grown up. A bed of straw lay scattered in the far corner. The young warrior stumbled over to it and lay down his head. He was asleep before the innkeeper shut the door.

Three

Dunk awoke at dawn to what sounded like a gang of angry giants tearing the roof off of the building. Still shirtless, he leapt to his feet and cast about for his sword for a moment before he remembered that he’d left it in the chimera’s cave. A banging at the door brought his attention slamming back from last night to the present.

‘Hey, hero!’ Gastwirt said through the thin planks of the door. ‘If you want to make a name for yourself, now’s the time!’

As Dunk shoved on his boots and tossed on a shirt, the innkeeper threw open the door. ‘No time for modesty,’ Gastwirt scowled. ‘Your Chaos-damned doom followed you here, and if you don’t go out to meet it, it’ll tear the town apart trying to find you.’

For a moment, Dunk didn’t understand the man’s words, but then a roaring, hissing, bleating yowl rattled the ramshackle shutters strung across the cramped room’s lopsided window. The young man’s eyes felt like they might spring from his head as he stared out of the window and then back at the white-faced innkeeper.

‘The chimera is here?’ Dunk asked, the thought gluing his feet to the rough worn floor.

‘Got it in one,’ Gastwirt said with a pitiless smirk. ‘And it wants your head.’

‘How do you know that?’ the shocked Dunk asked.

The strange choir of angry voices outside changed from howls to shouts, and Dunk could make out its chorus. ‘The hero!’ it said. ‘Bring us his head!’

Dunk glanced around him. No blade, not even a knife. He thought of running, but he knew he’d never outpace the winged beast. Pferd might be able to outrun the creature, but the last Dunk had seen of his horse it had been hitched out in front of the inn, in the open, a ripe target on which a mad monster could unleash its wrath.

The innkeeper was right. He was doomed.

Gastwirt reached out and grabbed Dunk by the shoulder, his injured one, which felt like a lance rammed through the warrior’s arm. He cried out in protest and shrugged free, but the innkeeper just grabbed his other arm instead.

‘Your hand put this wheel in motion,’ Gastwirt snarled at Dunk. ‘You placed your bet, and now it’s time to pay up.’

Slick stepped in from the hallway and slipped in between the two men. ‘You can’t send him out there,’ the halfling said. ‘That beast will rip him apart.’

The innkeeper’s hand let go as Dunk wrested his other arm away. Gastwirt leaned down to shout into Slick’s face. ‘This bastard you’ve befriended went out last night and enraged that carnivorous creature. If we don’t give it what it wants, it’ll kill us all!’

Slick nodded as he considered this for a moment. Then he turned back to Dunk and said, ‘He’s got a point, son. Sorry about all this, but you’d better go.’

‘What?’ Dunk said. As he spoke, something heavy crashed onto the inn’s roof, and dust and clods of dirt cascaded down from the ceiling. ‘I’m not going out to face that thing.’

Dunk turned to Gastwirt. ‘You and your friends sent me off to die. You can all rot!’

Slick patted Dunk on the back of his leg. ‘Come now, son, there’s no reason for us all to die, right?’ His tone sounded as if he were trying to convince Dunk to take a walk with him in the rain. ‘There’s no way for you to get away from that beast, so you might as well go face up to it like a man. Think of the children.’

‘What children?’ Dunk asked, goggling at the halfling.

Slick shrugged. ‘It’s a town. There have to be children here, right?’ He looked to Gastwirt for some help.

‘Loads of children,’ the innkeeper said. ‘Normally you can’t walk around here without tripping over them. They’re orphans, too, the whole lot of them. A pitiful bunch to be sure.’

Dunk snarled at the blatant lies. Still, he thought, there did have to be some innocents in this town, and he couldn’t be the cause of their deaths.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll go. Wish me luck, you cowards.’

Slick clapped Dunk on the back of his thigh and favoured him with a rueful smile. ‘A man like you has no need for luck, son. Just go out there and face your fate.’

The chimera cried out for Dunk again. Shaking his head, the young warrior shoved past the halfling and pushed the innkeeper out of his way. He wasn’t doing anyone any good stuck in this room, least of all Pferd.

As Dunk stormed into the inn’s empty common room, he heard the innkeeper behind him quietly say, ‘Ten crowns says that beast eats him for breakfast.’

‘You, sir,’ Slick said, ‘have yourself a bet.’

Dunk didn’t know why the halfling would be willing to wager on him. He would have bet against himself if there had been any way to collect. Still, the thought that someone – anyone – had any kind of confidence in him encouraged him.

When the building’s shutters rattled again with the chimera’s roar and the beating of its wings, Dunk knew, however, that confidence wouldn’t get him far. ‘Can you at least loan me a blade?’ he called back at the innkeeper. He turned to see Gastwirt and Slick had followed him from the room, perhaps eager for the show soon to come.

The innkeeper, mindful of his bet, Dunk suspected, just shook his head. Slick, on the other hand, disappeared behind the bar that ran along the room’s north wall. A moment later, something long and sharp came flying over the bar to stab into the floor near Dunk’s feet.

‘Every barman has one,’ the halfling said as he rematerialised from behind the bar.

Dunk pulled the weapon from the floor and examined it. The sword was short, about half the length of his own blade, and it looked as if it had been used more often as a kitchen utensil than a weapon. Still, it beat using his bare hands. He hefted the thing in his hand and headed for the door.

Pferd stood there in the early morning light, straight, tall, and unperturbed. The black horse’s reins remained wrapped around the hitching post. He whinnied a short greeting to Dunk but showed no signs of fear, as if the creature still whirling somewhere overhead was little more than a sparrow with a poor attitude.

Dunk remembered how he had chosen Pferd for his own. One night, a fire had broken out in his family’s stables. Trapped, some of the horses had panicked and run deeper into the flames. They had all perished, but Pferd had stood his ground until the guards rescued him. He alone had survived.

‘That’s the horse I want, father,’ the young Dunk had said the next day. ‘That’s a beast you can count on.’ He had not once regretted making the request.

Scanning the skies above as he left the shelter of the inn, Dunk slashed out with his borrowed blade to cut loose Pferd’s reins. The blade bounced off the hitching post, leaving the leather leads intact, the weapon’s edge too dull to split them.

Dunk cursed as he reached out and loosed Pferd’s reins with his other hand. ‘Where is that thing, boy?’ he asked. The horse didn’t respond.

As he moved past Pferd and into the open street, Dunk used the sword to shade his eyes as he searched for the chimera among the low, dark clouds scattered by the stiff breeze that swept down from the mountains that day. He saw nothing up there, not even a lone bird. Dunk allowed himself a moment of hope that the creature had tired of hunting for him here and had flown off for other parts, but he quickly quashed it. Hope made a man lose focus, he knew, and that could be fatal.

‘You’ll need this, son!’ Slick shouted from the doorway of the inn.

Dunk glared over at the halfling to see him wrestling with the sharp end of the massive spear that had hung over the mantel in the inn’s common room, dragging the bulk of its length behind him. ‘Get back in there,’ Dunk ordered Slick as he dashed over and snatched the spear from him. ‘That thing could snap you up without stopping to chew.’

‘You’re welcome!’ Slick said, the sly grin never leaving his face. ‘I hope you’re better with a spear than you are at expressing your gratitude.’

Dunk started to come up with a snappy reply, but a loud noise from down the street saved him from having to make the effort. He whipped his head around to see the chimera pulling a holy icon from the steeple of the local temple. A man in red, priestly robes dashed out of the place, a gaggle of worshippers hot on his heels, all screeching louder than even the chimera above them. The heavy, stone icon crashed to the ground behind them as they raced up the street.

‘You!’ the priest said, pointing a thick finger at Dunk. The man’s corpulent face was red with the exertion of having managed to dash from the church before all of his followers, despite the fact he’d been standing at the altar in front of them. His round blue eyes glared at Dunk from under bushy, white eyebrows. ‘This is all your fault!’

‘Sod off!’ Dunk spat. He’d had enough of priests for a lifetime. He gave the gods their due, of course, but he had little time for the parasites who fed off the reputations of their chosen deities by purporting to bring their messages to the masses.

The priest’s face flushed even redder, and Dunk thought, perhaps even hoped, that the man might keel over right there with a stopped heart. Instead, the priest waved his terrified congregation after him, saying, ‘That’s who the beast wants, dead or alive! Let’s give him to it!’

As the priest charged at Dunk, the young warrior swung around the dull end of the spear and caught the holy man squarely in the chin. The priest collapsed in his robes like an item of laundry falling from a washing line. The others behind their religious leader froze in their tracks.

Dunk brought the sharp end of the spear around to bear on the handful of temple-goers staring at him. He didn’t want to hurt them, but he feared they didn’t share the same concern for him. The best way to end this altercation would be to stop it now. ‘All right,’ he snarled at those facing him, his voice dripping with menace. ‘Who’s next?’

‘We are!’ the chimera yowled in a trio of unnatural voices. Still atop the temple, it spread its bat-like wings wide and launched itself straight at Dunk, its paws and hooves ready to pummel and pound the young warrior into the dirt.

Dunk dived to the left as the creature came at him and it sailed harmlessly overhead, the tips of its claws finding no mark. It squawked in frustration as it curled back up into the open sky. The townspeople looked up after the thing, then looked at each other and scattered, each racing for a different hiding place, hoping that the chimera would choose to chase easier prey.

The priest scrambled to his feet, blood trickling from his mouth, the same colour as his robes. He glared at Dunk and yelled, ‘Kill the stranger!’

It was only when the priest looked around to see who would follow him that he realised he was alone. His eyes narrowed on the tip of the spear which Dunk pointed at him, and then he too turned and fled straight back down the street.

Dunk loosed a mean laugh until he saw the chimera’s winged shape swing around towards him at the end of the street. The beast rolled into position and hung in the sky for just a moment before plummeting into a dive straight down the length of the road.

Dunk’s first instinct was to simply jump into a building. He noticed that Gastwirt had shut his inn’s front door behind him, leaving Slick pounding desperately from the outside in an effort to get back in.

As Dunk looked about for another path of escape, he noticed that the chimera’s angle of dive would take it down far short of his position. For a moment, he thought the creature had misjudged the distance or simply wanted to skim the edge of the earth and rip him from below, but then he saw its real target: the priest.

The holy man realised this at about the same time Dunk did. He turned around immediately and started sprinting back in Dunk’s direction.

The priest glanced left and right madly, snapping his head all about. His parishioners had not only abandoned him, they’d locked their doors behind them. No matter where he turned, there was no help to be had.

Dunk hated to see a man cry like the priest – who wailed in desperate terror. He hefted the mighty spear that Slick had given him and took careful aim. It was heavy but well balanced. With luck, it would fly straight and true.

‘No!’ Slick said as he tried to crush himself into the narrow shelter offered by the frame of the inn’s door. ‘Don’t do it, son! That priest is dead anyway! Save yourself!’

Dunk snorted to himself, not sparing a second to glance back at the halfling. His target zoomed toward him at top speed. Armed only with the spear, he was only going to get one chance at this.

Dunk cocked back his arm, his shoulder flexing against the strain. Then he stepped forward and hurled the spear with all his might.

The chimera bore down on the priest mercilessly, all three of its heads reaching for the man at once, their jaws thrown wide open to expose gaping maws, each filled with a set of vicious teeth or fangs.

The priest screamed, offering up a quick prayer for mercy from the gods.

Dunk’s spear shot forth and stabbed into the snake-head, straight through its fanged mouth. It rammed up through the roof of the thing’s mouth and pierced its brain from below. It kept going until the thickening shaft caught in the snake-head’s skull.

At that point, the spear’s momentum snapped back hard against the chimera’s own, whipping the creature’s middle head back and up along its serpentine neck. The creature went tumbling backward over itself, the spear pulling it along until it embedded itself in the compacted dirt of the street, pinning the creature there by its killed head.

The priest looked up from where he had fallen to his knees in the final moments of the chimera’s pursuit, ready to make peace with the gods and plead for guidance into the afterlife. He saw nothing but open sky above him, and turned back to see the chimera pinned in the middle of the street like some massive insect in a particularly horrid collection.

‘Praise the gods!’ the priest said. ‘They have saved us all! Thanks be to them in their wondrous wisdom!’

‘How’s that?’ Dunk said.

The priest looked back to where the unarmed warrior stood in the street, naked to the waist. He tried to speak, but no words escaped his lips.

‘I saved you,’ Dunk said. Behind the priest, the chimera’s remaining heads roared and bleated in fury and frustration. ‘Kill you aaall!’ The goat-head said as the lion-head loosed another blood-curdling cry.

The sight of the wounded beast seemed to bring the priest back to himself, and he fixed Dunk in a baleful glare. ‘That creature,’ he said, ‘would never have bothered us if not for your interference.’

Dunk couldn’t believe his ears. He shook his head as if to clear out the lies. ‘You told me it was a dragon! A weak and old dragon! You sent me to my death!’

The priest snarled back at the young warrior. ‘Your arrogance sent you on your path.’ A cold laugh escaped him. ‘You think you would have done any better against a dragon?’

Dunk gritted his teeth in frustration. ‘I just saved your entire town from a menace that has plagued it for generations. The least you owe me is your thanks.’

‘Really?’ the priest said. ‘We should thank you for destroying the balance of power in this region?’

Dunk gaped at the godly man.

‘That creature you just maimed, is the most powerful in the area. While we lived in its shadow, it kept us safe from threats of all sorts: brigands, carrion, orcs, even real dragons. Now, here we are, exposed to the world around us and every horrible thing in it. You’ve just destroyed this town.’

Dunk fell to one knee and put his head in his hands. The man’s words were madness, he knew, but they were the last thing he’d expected. He’d slain the beast, hadn’t he? Where was the glory? As for fortune, the only thing he’d seen in the creature’s cave had been mounds of bones. Dunk supposed that a chimera had little use for diamonds and gold.

Where had it all gone wrong?

A small hand came down on Dunk’s shoulder. He turned to see Slick looking him square in the eye. At this level, the Halfling didn’t look nearly so much like a child.

‘That’s gratitude for you, son,’ Slick said. ‘But it gets worse.’

Dunk shook his head at the halfling. None of this made any sense to him.

‘How?’ he said. He’d thought it was a rhetorical question.

Slick nodded down the street. Dunk looked up to see the townspeople poking their heads out of their homes, spotting the still-howling chimera, and then pointing their fingers at Dunk. He couldn’t hear their words, but he didn’t care for the tone of their voices.

‘Son,’ Slick said, ‘don’t stick around to find out.’

Click here to buy Blood Bowl

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2005 by BL Publishing.
This eBook edition published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover illustration by Max Bertolini.

© Games Workshop Limited 2005, 2015. All rights reserved.

Black Library, the Black Library logo, Warhammer, the Warhammer logo, Time of Legends, the Time of Legends logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated brands, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer universe are either ®, ™ and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2000-2015, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78251-926-3

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 You attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.