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Dead Ball – Extract

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One

The last thing that went through Henrik Karlmann’s head was the spike on the front of the football.

Dunkel ‘Dunk’ Hoffnung, star thrower for the Bad Bay Hackers, stood close enough to Henrik to catch the lineman when he fell. The ball juddered from Henrik’s forehead on its long, sharp tip. His dead eyes were crossed, still trying to focus on the thing that had killed him, his arms caught halfway up to where they would have been needed to save his life.

‘And Karlmann’s down!’ Bob Bifford’s voice echoed through the stadium via the Preternatural Announcement system, magically audible over the near-deafening roar of the crowd. ‘Ooh, Jim, that’s going to leave a mark!’

‘More like a marker, Bob – over his grave!’

‘That’s already three in the kill column for the Chaos All-Stars today, Jim. Do you think they could break their team record?’

‘To do that, they’d have to top their TPK from the Chaos Cup playoffs against the Stunted Stoutfellows. The Hackers are a bit tougher than halflings at least.’

‘I always thought it should be TOK for Total Opponent Kill, Jim.’

‘Well, Harry “The Hammer” Kehry coined the phrase back in 2482, and he never could spell. When he said ‘Total ’Ponent Kill’, would you argue with him?’

‘Not unless I wanted to end up like poor Karlmann there. Let’s hope the Hackers have a generous funeral insurance plan. It looks like they’re going to get a lot of use out of it.’

Dunk’s silvery eyes took one look up at Chthton – the octopus-armed beast that had thrown the bullet-like ball at his friend – and snarled. In one swift move, he snatched the ball from his fallen friend’s forehead and tucked it under his arm, taking care not to stab himself on its bloodied spikes. With the slavering, tentacled beast in the all-black helmet and jersey bearing down on him, Dunk had no time to get rid of the ball by passing it downfield. First, he had to scramble clear.

Dunk jinked to the left then broke right, but the Chaos-tainted Chthton spread his tentacles wide. One of them wrapped around Dunk’s arm as he tried to dash past, its wet, puckered cups adhering to Dunk’s shoulder pad and holding fast.

Dunk heard the fluid from Chthton’s tentacle flowing down his armour, sizzling as it went. Where it dripped off the shoulder pad onto his bare bicep, it burned like a red-hot brand. The second-year thrower howled in pain and pulled on the hard-stuck tentacle like an ox hauling a plough.

Chthton snorted something green and wet as he pulled back against Dunk, and the young Hacker felt his forward progress grind to a halt. He looked back at the warped creature and growled in pain, anger, and frustration. If he didn’t break free of Chthton soon – if the creature managed to tackle him – this game might be his last.

A thin hand shot out and hacked down at the tentacle, cutting it in half. As Chthton fell backward, blood spurting from the maimed stump of its arm, Dunk stared at his saviour.

Gigia Mardretti stood nearly as tall as Dunk’s six feet. Long, black hair cascaded from beneath her golden helmet, on the side of which a green, block H was emblazoned, overlaid with three crossed swords that followed the lines of the letter. Blood ran down her arm where it had sliced through the overstretched tentacle. She bore a satisfied little grin on her ruby-painted lips.

The blade embedded in the edge of Gigia’s gloves was illegal in Blood Bowl. In this sport, the players – and their armour, and maybe the ball – were supposed to be the weapons. Using anything else in the course of a match broke the rules.

Not that anyone paid much attention to the rules, including the referees. Perhaps especially the refs, who seemed to have taken their dangerous jobs just so they could solicit large bribes. Some sold themselves to both sides, their loyalties swapping back and forth faster than they could pocket their money.

‘Thanks!’ Dunk said as he spun to face back toward the All-Stars’ end of the field. Henrik had fallen deep in the Hacker’s territory, and now Dunk stared down eighty yards of Chaos-infested Astrogranite standing between him and the goal line.

A pair of All-Star blitzers came stampeding down the field toward Dunk as he cut right, looking for some daylight. None of his team-mates were open downfield, so he sprinted to the right, hoping to find some blockers or at least keep out of the blitzers’ grasp until he could get rid of the ball.

‘Would you look at that human run?’ Bob’s voice thundered over the PA. ‘He looks like a halfling being told mealtime’s almost over!’

‘You’d run for your life too if the All-Stars had the kind of grudge against you that they have for poor Hoffnung,’ said Jim. ‘Don’t you remember what happened when they met in the Chaos Cup finals last year?’

‘How could I ever forget? It’s not often you see someone kill the opposing team’s captain in the middle of halftime. Not to say that players don’t try it all the time, but to succeed, that’s something else.’

‘Especially against a mutant minotaur like Schlitz ‘Malty’ Likker. That bull had a six-pack of horns that could open most players up like a keg of ale. What was Hoffnung’s defence again?’

Dunk tried to shut out the blather coming over the PA. None of that mattered now. The Hackers had lost that game, and it had been over six months ago. In the world of Blood Bowl, that was a dozen lifetimes past – maybe more if you added in how many players the Hackers had lost just today.

Lars Englehard stepped up between Dunk and the two All-Stars on his tail. The lineman lowered his shoulders and took out both of them at once. It wasn’t until Dunk heard Lars start to scream that he wondered if the All-Stars weren’t really after the ball anyway.

‘I think Hoffnung said that Malty was “possessed by a daemon,” Bob said with a laugh. Jim joined in.

‘I think half the All-Stars on the field today might meet that criteria. And what about Nurgle’s Rotters?’

‘Too true, Jim. If we start removing players for any kind of possession, we won’t have many teams left!’

As Dunk stiff-armed a goat-headed blitzer wearing a carved-up All-Stars’ helmet, he thought perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. The game was lethal enough without adding daemons from hellish realms of Chaos into the mix.

The goat-man’s horns sprang forward and clamped around Dunk’s forearm like the jaws of a tiger. His vambrace there protected his flesh from being torn away, but when he tried to pull his arm free he discovered he was caught. The goat-headed creature bleated in low, guttural glee as it raked at Dunk’s face with its arms, which ended in cloven hooves.

Dunk swung his free arm around and stabbed the spiked ball up under the goat-man’s chin with desperate strength. The horns fell slack as the All-Star went silent and slid off Dunk’s hand.

‘Now that’s a turnabout for you,’ Bob said. ‘Hoffnung gets free, and the Hackers chalk up their first kill for the day.’

‘That ball’s getting a lot of action out there today, Bob. I’m glad to see they brought “Ol’ Spikey” back for the Spike! Magazine playoffs. Believe it or not, some people complain that a ball like that makes the games too deadly.’

Bob scoffed at Jim. ‘That’s like saying you can have too much Bloodweiser after the game. Wait, I didn’t think we were talking about what happened to you last night. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ogre that tipsy.’

‘That’s not fair,’ Jim said. ‘Vampires like you can’t get drunk.’

‘Right,’ Bob said sadly. ‘Now that’s unfair.’

‘Such is unlife.’

Free from the goat-man, Dunk scrambled back to his left, saw two more All-Stars blocking that way, and dropped back to his right again. Then he saw what he wanted: an open Hacker downfield.

Percival Smythe stood near the end zone in his green and gold uniform, sweeping his arms up and down in the universal signal for ‘I’m wide open!’

Dunk cocked back his arm and hurled the ball down the length of the field. It flew in a perfect spiral, the spikes spinning around its sides like a set of lethal wheels. Dunk wondered, not for the first time, how anyone could catch a pass like that without getting killed, but thankfully that was Percy’s problem, not his.

‘Oh, that’s a beautiful pass!’ Bob’s voice said. ‘And not an All-Star within 10 yards of Smythe!’

‘Yeah,’ Jim said, ‘but do you see Mackey?’

Dunk glared down the field and wondered what the announcers were talking about. Mackey Maus was the All-Stars’ new team captain, the one who’d taken over after Likker’s death, but he wasn’t anywhere near Percy. No one was.

The crowd, scores of thousands strong, roared as the ball sailed into Percy’s grasp. The noise drowned out anything else, so he didn’t hear the footfalls of the player who came up behind him and slammed him into the Astrogranite.

‘Hackers score!’ Bob’s voice said, his magically enhanced voice ringing out over din.

Dunk would have cheered, but he found that he couldn’t breathe. The player on top of him had driven the air from his lungs. He tried to push himself up on his arms, and something hit him hard in the back of the head. If not for his helmet, the blow would have caved in his skull. As it was, he felt the metal protecting his cranium dent in and dig into his scalp. Stars danced before his eyes.

‘Enjoy those cheers,’ Dunk’s attacker shouted, ‘until I tear off your ears!’

A long, sharp talon reached under Dunk’s neck and slashed at his throat. He felt something give and then wetness. Adrenaline coursed through Dunk’s veins, despite the fact he thought it was too late. He had to be dead already, but his body just didn’t know it.

In one desperate move, Dunk wrenched his body around. As he did, his helmet came off, and he realised that it was its leather strap he’d felt giving way. The cut on his neck burned, but the hope that it was only superficial surged in his heart.

The creature atop Dunk managed to maintain its position, even while the young thrower squirmed beneath him. It glared down at him from behind a greasy-furred, rat-like snout poking out through the open face of its jet-black helmet. Its ebony eyes glittered with madness as glowing, green spittle dripped from its long, narrow muzzle filled with short, sharp teeth. Dunk recognised the spitting-mad beastman instantly: Mackey, the Chaos-mutated skaven who’d been taking cheap shots at him all day.

Throughout it all, Dunk had tried to tell himself it was nothing personal. Death and dismemberment was all part of the game. Maybe it wasn’t legal by the rules, but people expected it. The fans, the coaches, the players, they all expected it.

Even the referees expected it. They didn’t haul the killers off and throw them in jail. They just hit them with a penalty.

But when a blood-parched, mutant skaven sat on top of Dunk and drooled something green and viscous on to his face, where it stung and burned like fire, he had his doubts.

‘Don’t let them get to you, son.’ Dunk’s agent, a rotund halfling by the name of Slick Fullbelly, had said the same thing to him over and over. ‘It’s their job to try to put you down, just as it’s yours to do the same to them. The trick is to do unto others before they do unto you. It’s nothing personal, for you or them. Remember that.’

‘This one’s for Schlitzy,’ Mackey said as he raked down with his long, filth-caked claws. ‘Say hi to him for me in hell!’

Faster than he could think, Dunk’s hands snapped up and caught Mackey by the wrists. He held the skaven’s arms out away from him, the tips of his talons only inches from Dunk’s face.

The crowd booed, hissing at the All-Star. It was one thing to kill someone while the ball was in play. Watching mayhem like that happen was a good part of why most of the fans showed up to the games. The chance to be spattered with warm blood proved too much for them to pass up.

After a score, though, it was time for the gridiron warriors to return to their respective corners, to lick their wounds until it was time to face each other again. To violate that understanding was more than just breaking the rules. Players chewed up the rulebook and spat it out during every game.

To try to kill someone during one of these few down moments, though, was known as a dead ball foul. Few fans would tolerate this worst kind of cheating. Not even the best-bribed referees could afford to ignore so flagrant a foul.

So the crowd cheered when Dunk sat up hard and bashed his forehead into Mackey’s sneering mouth. He felt teeth snap and flesh shred in the skaven’s mouth, and when he drew back, blood, mucous, and the creature’s glowing saliva coated his own forehead.

Dunk tried to shove Mackey off, but the skaven snapped down at him instead, trying to savage him with its broken front teeth. To keep himself from the creature’s reach, Dunk fell back again. When his head hit the Astrogranite, though, he knew he had nowhere else left to go.

Panicked, Dunk pressed up against Mackey again, trying to throw him off, but the skaven, mad with pain, refused to relent for a moment. He used his weight to press down against Dunk’s arms, lowering his snapping, bloodied snout inch by inch toward Dunk’s exposed neck.

Dunk tried to swing his legs up and throw the skaven over his head, but Mackey’s legs clamped around his waist like iron bands. Those jaws of his kept getting lower and lower.

Mackey had Dunk’s arms pressed hard against his chest now. The Hacker thrower tried to butt the skaven with his head again, but he couldn’t get the momentum to do more than annoy the insane beast.

Mackey chortled at this, coughing and snorting up blood and mucous that dripped through his shattered teeth. He shoved his snout down at Dunk’s neck, but the thrower managed to deflect the skaven’s nose with his chin. Quick as a snake, Mackey forced his sopping-wet snout past Dunk’s cheek and began to pry the Hacker’s chin up with the end of his pointed nose.

‘Stop it!’ Dunk said, unable to think of anything else to do. Where were the referees when you needed them? Probably they didn’t want to get involved in the middle of a mortal combat like this. It was one thing to give out a penalty to someone who committed a foul. It was something else entirely to risk your life trying to get between two trained and armoured Blood Bowl players.

Mackey responded by snuffling its nostrils against the underside of Dunk’s jawline.

‘Hey!’ Dunk shouted. ‘Not on a first date!’

‘Your blood.’ Mackey growled softly into Dunk’s ear. ‘It smells delicious.’

At times like this, Dunk sometimes wished he was a praying man. He’d seen enough of the fickleness of the gods to know that using your last breath calling on them was a waste. Still, nothing else more useful came to mind either.

Dunk tried to think of something pithy, some last words that would sting his killer or at least give the world a reason to remember him. The jagged touch of the creature’s teeth pressing down over his jugular vein, though, forced everything but blind panic from his head.

Dunk gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. As he did, he found images of Spinne Schönheit whirling through his mind. The beautiful catcher for the Reikland Reavers had only been dating him for a few months, but he already knew that he loved her with all his heart, that he wanted to marry her, to have kids, to grow old. Now none of that would happen – growing old, most of all.

Dunk felt Mackey spread his teeth, readying himself for the bite that would end Dunk’s life. He felt the skaven’s acidic drool burn its way around his throat as if preparing the way for the mortal wound.

His eyes still closed, Dunk felt Mackey’s face draw back, and he stiffened for the final blow. Instead, he heard a sickening snap and felt Mackey’s grip on him fall slack.

Dunk peeled one eye open and then the other to find a massive creature towering over him. He stood over eight feet tall and massed at least four hundred pounds, twice the size of Dunk. Polished tusks jutted from his lower jaw, and a golden ring the size of a bracelet hung like a doorknocker from the septum of his broken nose.

The ogre peered down at Dunk, Mackey’s head in one hand and his body in the other, hot blood pouring from them both.

The crowd went nuts. The cheers were so loud Dunk wondered if his ears might bleed.

‘Dunkel okay?’ the ogre said, concern furrowing his massive brow as he let the separate parts of what had once been Mackey drop to the Astrogranite.

‘I am now, big guy,’ Dunk said as he took the ogre’s hand and let the creature haul him to his feet. ‘Thanks, M’Grash.’

As Dunk wiped Mackey’s blood, snot, and spit from himself, a tall, thin orc in a black-and-white striped shirt ran up and threw something at M’Grash: a sack of sand wrapped in a long, yellow ribbon of cloth. It fluttered to the ground after bouncing off the ogre’s chest.

‘I don’t believe it!’ Bob’s voice said over the PA. ‘They’re going to call a penalty on K’Thragsh!’

The crowd’s cheers turned to boos. Dunk started to shout something at the referee, but the official just waved him off. Then the orc stood to face the announcer’s box and crossed his arms in an X over his head. Then he pointed to M’Grash.

‘Holy Nuffle’s battered balls!’ Bob said. ‘It’s a dead ball foul on M’Grash!’

‘What’s the penalty going to be?’ asked Jim.

The ref pulled back his hand and then stabbed his finger to point out over the top rows of the stadium.

‘He’s kicking M’Grash K’Thragsh out of the game!’

‘Oh, the crowd doesn’t like this, Jim.’

Dunk put his hand on M’Grash’s arm and felt the ogre flex his muscles. They were like steel.

The ref started to back-pedal as he watched M’Grash glare at him with his saucer-sized eyes. He put up his hands and flinched when the ogre snorted. The crowd went wild.

‘Give! Him! To! Us!’ the fans chanted. ‘Give! Him! To! Us!’

The ref turned and sprinted away down the field.

‘M’Grash,’ Dunk said, trying to hold on to the ogre’s arm. ‘Don’t do–’

Before he could finish, though, M’Grash tore free and lumbered after the fleeing ref with a stride twice as long as his prey’s.

Dunk threw up his hands and decided to watch and enjoy the chase. ‘They’ve already kicked him out of the game,’ he said. ‘What else can they do to him?’

Two

‘Can you get that through that thick excuse for a head you keep stitched on top of your shoulders?’

Dunk had rarely seen Captain Pegleg Haken, the head coach of the Hackers, so mad. The ex-pirate had the hook that stabbed from his left sleeve linked through M’Grash’s nose ring and had pulled the ogre’s face down to his so he could scream right into it.

‘Sorry, coach,’ M’Grash said, whimpering like a kicked puppy.

Dunk knew the ogre could kill Pegleg in an instant, just as he’d torn Mackey apart out on the field, but he also knew he wouldn’t. To M’Grash, Pegleg stood at the right hand of Nuffle, the sacred god of Blood Bowl that most of the game’s players and many of its fans worshipped. From the way most of the other players in the locker room pressed against the walls, trying to stay as far away from Pegleg’s wrath as possible, Dunk guessed that M’Grash wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

‘Sorry isn’t going to cut it!’ Pegleg said. He gave the ogre’s nose ring a last tweak and let it go from his hook. Then he turned to glare at the rest of the players. Sweat ran down his reddened face, and his eyes blazed with fury.

‘What in Nuffle’s name is wrong with the lot of you?’ Pegleg asked. ‘It’s only halftime, and we’ve lost five players!’ He shot a murderous look at the ogre. ‘Besides M’Grash, we’ll need funerals after the game for four of them!’

‘Coach,’ Dunk said, interrupting Pegleg’s rant. He instantly regretted it. The temperature in the room seemed to drop from hot and bothered to ice-cold mean in the space of a second. No one moved, apparently frozen in place. Pegleg might have stopped shouting, but Dunk couldn’t hear anyone else breathing, not even himself.

He glanced over at his agent, Slick Fullbelly, who stood hiding in the room’s far corner. At only three feet tall, the rotund halfling seemed to be trying to hide under his unruly mop of curly dark hair. None of the other players’ agents dared to come into the locker room for fear of incurring Pegleg’s wrath. The coach considered most agents vermin and would as soon stab one as talk to him, but he tolerated Slick, who always walked around like he owned the place.

Pegleg turned to stare at Dunk; his eyes wide and amazed as if the young thrower had just had a second head sprout from his nose. ‘Yes, Mr. Hoffnung?’ he said with a formal smile that showed a gold tooth in the centre of his rotted teeth.

A shiver ran down Dunk’s spine. Ever since the Blood Bowl finals last season, Pegleg had called him by his first name as a sign of the respect he’d worked so hard to earn.

Slick stared at Dunk in horror and mouthed a single word to him: ‘Run.’

Dunk ignored the halfling’s advice, even though a part of him wanted nothing more than to run screaming into the relative safety of the playing field. Instead, he met Pegleg’s steely glare and spoke, taking care to not let his voice crack.

‘Coach, they’re killing us out there, literally. Maybe we should–’ Dunk stopped here to swallow. ‘Maybe we should call it a day.’

When Dunk stopped talking, the room fell silent. No one else breathed a word. For a moment, Dunk wondered if some horrible magic had frozen them all in place, including him. He thought of trying to test it, but he couldn’t manage to convince his body of the promise the idea held.

Pegleg reached up with his hook and inserted it into his ear, where he screwed it around two or three times before taking it back out. ‘Would you care to clarify that? I don’t think I could have heard you properly.’

Dunk looked down at Pegleg’s hook and saw blood smeared on it.

‘Maybe.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Maybe we should forfeit.’ He held up his hands as he heard everyone in the room gasp – everyone but Pegleg, who stood watching him like a statue.

‘Coach, we’ve lost five players. That brings us down to eleven. If we lose another, we won’t have enough left to field a team.’

‘What, Mr. Hoffnung, is your point?’ Pegleg reached up and wiped the stone-sharpened tip of his hook clean on his tricorn hat as he spoke. The blood left a dark red streak along the bright yellow crown.

‘If we lose another player, we’ll have to forfeit anyway, right? Since we’ve already lost five players in one half, I don’t doubt–’ Dunk cut himself short as he realised some of the other players, the ones not too terrified of Pegleg, were laughing. ‘What?’ he asked, flushing with anger. ‘We’re going to lose this match. Let’s call it quits before another of us has to die.’

The rest of the players started to snigger, and soon the locker room shook with laughter. Pegleg had to sit down to hold his belly with his hook and wipe the tears from his face with his good hand.

‘What?’ Dunk asked. ‘Are you all so jaded you don’t care if one more of us dies before we lose the game?’

Rhett Cavre, a hard-muscled, dark-skinned man standing next to Pegleg, spoke. ‘Dunk, you don’t need eleven players to keep playing.’ Cavre had been on the team longer than anyone and had become a legend on the Blood Bowl pitch. He also worked as the team’s assistant coach and, when travelling by sea, Captain Haken’s first mate. Dunk knew Cavre took the game as seriously as anyone, but he couldn’t believe his own ears.

‘You don’t? But if we don’t have at least eleven, they won’t let us on the field, right? Remember that game in Kislev? We could barely get six of us on the field, and they made us forfeit the game.’

‘That’s because the rest of us were too hung over to move,’ Percy said from a far corner of the room. Maybe the catcher was still riding high from his touchdown reception. Most days he’d have been too cautious to say something like that in Pegleg’s presence.

‘Damn that Bloodweiser they serve there,’ Slick said, turning toward Pegleg to keep him from turning and plunging his hook into Percy’s chest. ‘They call it by the same name, but it’s not. They’ve been brewing that stuff in the same cauldrons for a thousand years, and it’s strong enough to bring an ogre to his knees.’

M’Grash let loose a whimper at the thought of the hangover he’d endured that day. It had taken three men to pull his head out of the bog.

‘Blüdvar, the Kislevites call it. Translates into “Blood War”, I think.’

Slick’s voice trailed off as he noticed Pegleg looming over him like the shadow of death, his eyes trying to burn holes down through the halfling’s head, straight to his furry, unshod toes.

‘Anyway, son,’ Slick said, scurrying toward Dunk to get out of range of Pegleg’s hook, ‘you only need eleven players to start the game.’

Dunk stared at the halfling for a moment, and then glanced over at Pegleg. The captain wore a grim look on his face that Dunk could not read.

‘But, coach,’ Dunk said, ‘how many people are we willing to lose before we – well, before we give up?’

Pegleg hobbled over on his good leg and the wooden stump that sprouted from the bottom of his right knee. Standing as tall as Dunk, he stared deep into the young thrower’s eyes. His were the blue of the open sea, filled with the wisdom of his years but deep and hidden all the same. Although his voice was rough and low, it carried throughout the room as if he spoke over the stadium’s PA system.

‘This is the nature of the game, Dunk. Some teams play to score points. Others play to kill.’

‘What about us?’

‘We play to win.’

Dunk swallowed hard, and then nodded, never taking his eyes from Pegleg’s.

A tiny snotling, a goblin-like creature only half the size of Slick, poked his head into the locker room and said, ‘One minute until the second half.’ His high-pitched voice sounded like that of a child with a bad cold, but no one laughed.

The snotling peered around the room at the Hackers’ sombre faces. ‘You always have such rousing halftime speeches?’ he said.

Pegleg snatched off his hat and hurled it at the little, green-skinned creature. It sailed toward him, spinning like a disc, and smacked into him with a non-hat-like thunk. The snotling let out a little ‘Eep!’ and dropped to the ground unconscious.

‘I’ve hit my limit today for stupid questions,’ the coach roared as he spun around to glare at each of his players in turn. ‘The next person to ask one will think the snotling got off easy. Now let’s get out there and win this damned game!’

Dunk charged past the coach and led the way out on to the field.

In the middle of the second half, Dunk threw another touchdown pass to Otto Waltheim, one of the Hackers’ best catchers. The score put the Hackers ahead of the All-Stars, three to nothing, but after the catch an All-Star with an octopus for a head knocked Otto into the stands.

Dunk and the other Hackers could do no more than watch as the fans grabbed Otto and passed him up to the top edge of the stadium and pitched him over. The same thing had happened to Dunk in last year’s Spike! Magazine tournament, and he’d survived only by the sheer luck of tearing through a series of awnings before landing on a food vendor’s cart. By the way the crowd roared again soon after they tossed poor Otto over the edge, Dunk guessed his team-mate hadn’t been so fortunate.

As Dunk and the remaining Hackers lined up to kick the ball, he allowed himself a quick headcount. Only ten Hackers were left. There were three catchers: Gigia Mardretti, Percival Smythe, and Simon Sherwood; three blitzers: Andreas Waltheim, Milo Hoffstetter, and Rhett Cavre; and three linemen: Kai Albrecht, Karsten Klemmer, and Guillermo Reyes. Dunk, the only thrower left, made ten. M’Grash was the only player left on the sideline, and he’d been banned from the game.

Milo kicked the ball, and the rest of the team raced down the field to take it away from the All-Stars. As Dunk sprinted along next to Guillermo, he smelled something dark and pungent that made him want to cough. Downfield, he spied a plume of smoke coming from the area where the ball had landed.

‘What are those Chaos cultists burning down there?’ Dunk asked Guillermo, but the big, bearded Estalian just shrugged his shoulders.

‘Smells like oil,’ Guillermo said. Then a loud buzzing noise, like the sound of a hive of angry, giant bees, came from the same direction. ‘Sounds like mayhem.’

With all the players still between him and the ball, Dunk couldn’t see what was going on. Kick-offs often ended up in pile-ups of players that sometimes had to be pried apart before the game could continue.

Then the screaming started, and the crowd went wild.

‘Did you see that, Bob?’ Jim’s voice rang out over the loudspeakers. ‘I think I saw an arm come flying out of that scrum down there.’

‘It could have been a leg – or a tentacle. It’s hard to tell from here. Let’s take a look at the Jumboball image at the end of the field, brought to us by Wolf Sports, the top name in Cabalvision broadcasting. And I’m not just saying that because they sign our cheques!’

‘No, the network’s Censer Wizards make sure of that. Nothing like the threat of being roasted over a crucible filled with red-hot coals to motivate an on-air personality, eh?’

Dunk shaded his eyes to glance up at the twenty-foot-tall crystal ball mounted over the rim of the stadium’s west end. It hadn’t been there last year, but he’d heard that Wolf Sports had installed it to show the fans in the stadium what they were missing at home.

The Jumboball didn’t produce any sound, but the screams still threatened to pierce Dunk’s ears as he and Guillermo stampeded toward the pile. In the Jumboball, Dunk saw a close-up image of the stack of players piled over the ball. The players in the pile would normally all be jabbing and stabbing at each other, trying to inflict an injury that a referee wouldn’t be able to see. Now, though, smoke and a reddish mist that could only be blood obscured most of the view. On the edges of the pile, Dunk saw the Hacker players trying to break free while the All-Stars pulled them back into the pink smoke.

The buzzing from inside the pile grew to a roar as Dunk charged into the fray. Then a dwarf in Chaos All-Stars armour burst from the smoke, madness pirouetting in his wide, ice-blue eyes. These were the only things that showed clearly under the splattered blood and gore that coated the front of the dwarf’s armour and his face and bushy beard in a thick layer of red.

Something horrible growled in the dwarf’s hands, the like of which Dunk had never seen before. It stretched from the Chaos-tainted creature’s hands the length of a sword, but its handle roared like a dragon and belched black smoke into the air. The edge of the sword’s blade bore three-inch long serrations shaped like a manticore’s teeth, and they carried bits of bone and gristle caught between them.

The dwarf cranked something on the weapon’s handle, and the serrations began to move. They started slow but soon spun around the edge of the blade so fast they became a blur of crimson and steel.

‘Nuffle’s holy gridiron!’ Bob’s voice said over the PA. ‘It’s Gimlet the Lost, and he’s got a chainsaw!’

Somewhere, Dunk heard a whistle as a referee called the play dead, but he knew it wouldn’t matter. From the look in Gimlet’s eyes, he wasn’t going to let anything stop him until he ran out of fuel, and the chainsaw – if that’s what that thing was – seemed fully loaded.

Dunk gave Guillermo a shove and pointed for the lineman to circle to Gimlet’s right. Without looking to see if Guillermo complied, Dunk veered left, hoping to catch Gimlet in a pincer move. He hoped this might confuse the blood-drenched dwarf, but if it didn’t at least it would mean he could only attack one of them at a time.

Gimlet swung his chainsaw in a wide circle, trying to gore both of the Hackers as they came at him. The blade missed Dunk, but it caught Guillermo on the side of the helmet and sent him sprawling. Gimlet followed up on the attack, raising the chainsaw over his head as he stomped after the downed lineman.

With Gimlet’s back to him, Dunk charged at the All-Star and tried to tackle him. He wrapped his arms around the dwarf, but he could not bring him down. It was like trying to tackle a rock. His grasp kept the dwarf’s arms trapped close to his body, but Gimlet kept marching forward, step-by-step, dragging Dunk along behind him like an overlong cloak, until he stood over Guillermo’s body.

Dunk peered over Gimlet’s shoulder to see that the dwarf’s first blow had cracked open the lineman’s helmet and spilled out the contents like a rotten egg. Gimlet cackled with mad glee and began to bring his hands up, angling his wrists so that the chainsaw pointed back over his shoulder, straight toward Dunk’s own helmet.

As the chainsaw’s buzzing blade came lower and lower, the sound almost drowning out the shouts from the crowd, Dunk squeezed Gimlet harder and harder, trying to force the dwarf’s hands back down. All he managed to do was slow the blade’s inexorable progress. He had to try something else, fast.

Dunk wrapped his leg around to plant his foot in front of Gimlet’s legs. The dwarf snorted, perhaps thinking Dunk only meant to try to squeeze him with his legs as well. Gimlet leaned forward harder, pushing the chainsaw back behind him as he did so. The whizzing blade met, screeching and sparking against Dunk’s helmet.

Dunk let go with his arms, keeping his foot steady where it was. Freed from the Hacker’s arms, Gimlet brought his blade back down in front of him and let out a wild laugh. As he tried to step forward, though, his feet met Dunk’s booted foot, and he tripped.

Gimlet landed on his chainsaw face first. The blade screeched right through his exposed face and then his breastplate, digging its way through his hot, gurgling corpse.

The machine was still running when the referee came over and shut it off. The scene played over and over again in glorious crimson colour on the Jumboball high above them.

‘Did you see that move, Jim? And the way that chainsaw parted Gimlet’s armour? Amazing!’

‘It sure is, Bob! It looks like Dunk Hoffnung, one of last year’s most promising rookies, is taking charge of this game.’

‘It’s about – wait! What’s this?’

Dunk looked up to see what the announcers were chatting about, and he saw a yellow penalty flag flutter over the Astrogranite and land at a bloodied player’s feet. Then he looked down at the artificial turf before him. The flag sat right there.

‘They’ve called a penalty against Hoffnung! Can you believe it?’

‘Well, Jim, it’s clear whose gold is lining the ref’s pockets today. What’s the call?’

‘Illegal use of a weapon! The ref is accusing Hoffnung of using that chainsaw to kill Gimlet!’

‘You can’t do this!’ Dunk screamed into the ref’s face. He pointed down at Gimlet. ‘It’s his chainsaw. He killed all those people!’

The tall, thin elf sneered back at the Hacker. ‘So you say. You see it your way, and I’ll see it mine. But only mine counts.’

Rage threatened to explode Dunk’s head from the inside. A red veil dropped down over his eyes, and the next thing he knew he found himself chasing the ref back up the field.

The crowd loved it.

Three

Dunk never caught up with the referee. The dark elf ran with the grace of a gazelle – which probably explained how he’d survived so long as a referee – and Dunk’s armour and injuries slowed him down. He kept pace with the ref until they reached the Hackers’ end zone, on the opposite end of the field from all the carnage, but as he crossed the goal line his rage lost its battle with his legs, which refused to run any more.

Dunk bent over and grabbed his thighs as he tried to suck more air into his lungs. As he did so, the crowd booed. The fans had tasted plenty of blood today, but it had only made them hungry for more. To Dunk, it seemed they wanted the referee dead as much as he did.

‘The crowd is not happy about this!’ Jim said.

‘No, Jim, they’re not. I haven’t seen a referee show such a blatant disregard for the rules and for any sense of fair play since the Athelorn Avengers played the Dwarf Giants.’

‘Bob, that was only last week!’

Dunk raised his head and stared up at the Jumboball. Images of Gimlet’s death flashed through it. Then he saw the referee racing away from him, thumbing his nose first at Dunk and then the crowd.

The sequence played through again, although more wobbly this time, and Dunk – enough air in his lungs at last – stood up to glare at the ref. He considered chasing after the corrupt dark elf again, but the way his vision had been shaking he didn’t think he was up for it. As he stared at the ref, though, he realised there was nothing wrong with his vision.

‘I think the fans have a plan for revenge here, Bob,’ Jim’s voice said.

‘Sure,’ Bob said, ‘but do you think they’ve really thought this through?’

‘They wouldn’t be Blood Bowl fans if they had. Look at that Jumboball shake! The fans up there in the cheap seats are going to get more than nosebleeds if they keep that up!’

Dunk peered up at the far end zone and saw the Jumboball juddering like – well, like the spiked football had in Henrik’s head. A sense of dread filled him, but before he could give it voice, the wooden stand that held the boulder-sized crystal gave way with a crack he could hear clear across the stadium.

The ball hung there in the air for a moment before spilling forward onto the people standing in the seats beneath it.

The crowd howled in pain and fear as the ball began to roll down the inside of the stadium’s bowl, crushing both the slower fans and the stands from which they sought to scramble. It picked up speed as it went, and it reached the Astrogranite in mere, bloody seconds, busting through the low restraining wall meant to keep the fans from making easy grabs at unwary players.

When the Jumboball entered the All-Stars’ end zone, the players still stuck in the remnants of the pile-up around the ball realised something was wrong. Dunk saw Gigia stand up and try to pull a wounded Milo out of the massive thing’s rolling path, but he was too injured to do more than slow her down. Andreas tried to pitch in to help, but he only doomed himself as well. The red-stained crystal smashed all three Hackers beneath its rolling bulk.

A number of the All-Stars went down too, as the Jumboball didn’t take sides in this, the first game it had ever entered. It just kept rolling along, oblivious to the destruction it left in its wake.

Dunk peered past the ball, forgetting the treacherous referee in the face of this new threat. He saw Cavre and Simon racing away from the ball, running north, toward the Hackers’ dugout. With any luck, they would be safe.

In the centre of the field, Karsten and Guillermo sprinted toward Dunk at top speed. If they were hoping to outrun the monstrous crystal ball, it seemed they were doomed to lose. The two linemen realised this and turned right, heading toward the All-Stars’ dugout.

Dunk breathed a sigh of relief and started for the Hackers’ dugout himself. First he headed north, planning to hug the edge of the field to keep as far from the Jumboball’s path as he could.

To Dunk’s amazement, the Jumboball veered off to the left, forging a new path that would intercept Karsten and Guillermo long before they made it to the relative safety of the All-Stars’ dugout. Dunk was sure that any Hackers who literally landed in their foes’ laps were in for a savage beating, but at least they’d survive that. Probably.

Dunk shouted a warning to Karsten and Guillermo, but the roar of the crowd at the Jumboball’s abrupt change of course drowned out any hope of his friends hearing him. Despite this, the two Hackers glanced back to see where the Jumboball was and found it hot on their tail. Guillermo shoved Karsten to the left and took off to the right himself, splitting them so that the Jumboball would pass between them and roll right into the All-Stars’ dugout.

This dugout, like the Hackers’, featured a set of steps that led down into the ground. Tall players standing on the broad floor could look out over the field at about eye level. Others could achieve the same effect by climbing a few steps.

A concrete roof angled back to protect the occupants of the dugout from the fans in the stands behind it. Riots seemed to break out in just about every game, and when they did the players could dive right into their dugouts to avoid thrown beer steins, rotten tomatoes, and even rusty knives.

Dunk wondered if the roof would be enough to stop the Jumboball. Or would the massive sphere crush the structure and everyone in it? As much as he hated to see people die, a part of him felt that if any team deserved such carnage it was the Chaos All-Stars.

The Jumboball ground to a halt before it reached the dugout. It hesitated there for a moment and then veered left.

‘Wow! Have you ever seen anything like that, Bob? Talk about playing on an unlevel field.’

‘Uh, no. Never! It seems like that rogue Jumboball has a mind of its own.’

Dunk wondered for a moment if he was seeing things. Then he spotted a familiar face in the All-Stars’ dugout: Schlechter Zauberer.

Dunk had last seen the middle-aged wizard at last year’s Chaos Bowl, in the middle of the same game at which he’d killed the bull-headed Likker. He wore the same midnight-blue robes with bluish-white piping that highlighted their edges, and the same polished silver skullcap that glinted in the midday sun. He waved a wand that resembled the blackened thighbone of some large bird, and the Jumboball followed his gestures.

Although Dunk had almost made it to the safety of the Hackers’ dugout, he saw only one course of action. He sprinted across the gridiron to rip Zauberer’s wispy white beard off his receding chin.

‘Dunk!’ Pegleg called after him. ‘Get back here, damn your meaty legs!’

The thrower ignored his coach’s pleas, pretending he couldn’t hear them over the crowd. It wasn’t hard to do.

As Dunk neared the All-Stars’ dugout, a pair of benchwarmers leapt from the dugout and charged at him. The first, a twisted lizardman bearing two massive tails, threw back its head and hissed a challenge at Dunk. A pair of eyeballs twisted on the end of its long, sinuous tongue as it slipped in and out of its toothy maw.

The second creature worried Dunk more. The stone-skinned troll stood twice as tall as the Hacker and bore spike-knuckled fists, each as large as Dunk’s head. It bellowed at the thrower as it lumbered toward him, smashing holes in the Astrogranite for emphasis.

The crowd cheered. Dunk glanced to his left to see Karsten’s flattened remains come slipping off the backside of the Jumboball, which had just run him over. The ball came to a halt, then backed up, running over Karsten again and heading straight for Dunk.

Dunk looked back toward the All-Stars’ dugout and saw that the lizardman and troll were coming at him like a pair of runaway battlewagons. He turned and ran in the other direction. Zauberer would have to wait.

For a moment, Dunk thought he had a chance. Despite the troll’s long strides, he could outrun him in a fair race. The lizardman, though, wasn’t going to give Dunk a chance. The lizardman couldn’t run any faster than Dunk, but he was fresh off the bench. Dunk’s legs felt like he wore lead anklets that became heavier with every step.

And then there was the Jumboball.

‘This is amazing, Bob,’ Jim’s voice said. ‘Hoffnung seemed to be hunting for an epic death with his charge into the All-Stars’ dugout, but at the last moment he lost his nerve.’

‘It’s one thing to die,’ said Bob. ‘As a vampire, I know all about it. It’s something else to be torn to pieces and eaten. Chaos trolls like Krader there have been known to do that.’

‘That’s if Sseth Skinshucker doesn’t get a hold of Dunk first. As we know from last year’s Blood Bowl qualifying rounds, Sseth doesn’t like to share.’

‘I’ve never seen anyone swallow a halfling whole like that before. I understand it took him the better part of the week to digest poor Puddin Fatfellow.’

‘True, although I hear the Greenfield Grasshuggers took longer than that to select a new captain!’

These words spurred Dunk on toward the All-Stars’ end zone. As he leaped over the pile of dead bodies near where Gimlet fell, he heard a low rumbling noise under the maddening roar of the crowd. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the Jumboball bounce along over the corpses only a dozen feet behind him. Sseth and Krader had veered off to the south to give it room to pass, but they still kept pace.

‘Ooh! It looks like the jaunty Jumboball is going to win that footrace instead, Jim.’

‘It could be – but wait! We have a new entrant into the fray!’

Dunk snapped his head around to see what Bob could mean. As he did, he saw M’Grash come stampeding in from the Hackers’ dugout and hurl himself into the Jumboball’s spinning side.

Despite the ogre’s size, the Jumboball stood more than twice his height. This didn’t faze him for a moment. He lowered his shoulder and smashed his spiked spaulder flat into the massive crystal. A loud crack rolled through the stadium like instant thunder, and the ball’s path skewed south.

Sseth leapt out of the way on his powerful haunches. To Dunk it looked like the lizardman’s tail propelled him out of the way. The troll, however, wasn’t so fortunate. Krader roared in protest before the Jumboball rolled over him, crushing him behind it as it smashed into the south stands.

Dunk skidded to a halt then ran back around to where M’Grash stood, holding his bruised shoulder. ‘What did you think you were doing?’ the thrower shouted. ‘You could have been killed!’

To Dunk’s surprise, the ogre blushed. ‘Me sorry, Dunkel,’ he said, lowering his eyes. ‘Didn’t want Dunkel to die.’

Dunk’s heart fell. M’Grash had the brains – and the moral framework, sadly – of a two-year-old. He hadn’t considered the risk to his own skin. He’d only known he had to save his friend’s life.

Dunk clapped M’Grash on the arm. ‘It’s all right, M’Grash. Actually, it’s better than that.’ He leaned over to peer up into the ogre’s weepy eyes. ‘Thanks.’

‘Mean it?’ M’Grash said as he wiped his eyes, a half-proud smile spreading across his face.

The thrower nodded. ‘Damn right. If not for you, I’d be– ‘

Dunk had to stop talking when Sseth’s tail knocked him clear past the ogre to land face first atop the pile of chainsaw-savaged cadavers.

‘Wow!’ said Bob. ‘You don’t see cheap shots like that every – wait! Yes, I guess you do!’

‘Too true, Bob,’ said Jim, ‘but that was a classic of the genre. The Cabalvision networks will be playing that one on the highlight feeds all week long.’

Dunk pushed himself to his knees, his battered back painfully protesting. He looked down and saw a body in a green and gold uniform beneath him. He had to squint, but it looked like Kai. Just three feet to his left, he spotted Percy’s severed head staring out at him through his intact helmet.

To Dunk, this had long since stopped being a game.

He stood up and cheered as he saw M’Grash grab Sseth by his long, green-scaled tail. The ogre leaned back and started to spin around, swinging the lizardman around by his extra appendage. After a half-dozen rotations, M’Grash let go and hurled Sseth right over the Jumboball and into the south stands.

‘So, Jim, what do you think the chances are of Skinshucker making it out of there alive?’

‘If the Gobbo was here, he’d lay six to one odds, Bob. Ooh! It looks like the fans might be putting Skinshucker’s last name to the test. That’s gotta hurt! I haven’t seen that many scales ripped off someone since my wife’s last trip to the spa!’

Before Dunk could run over to M’Grash to congratulate him, a sound like the bellow of a wounded dragon came from behind the Jumboball. The gigantic crystal dislodged from where it had come to rest against the crushed restraining wall separating the field from the stands. As it rolled to the right, Krader appeared from behind it, pushing himself up from where he’d fallen.

As Dunk watched, the troll’s battered skin and broken bones reknit themselves together. The crowd gasped, then cheered with delight.

‘With their regenerating powers, Bob, it’s hard to keep a good troll down.’

‘Or a bad one for that matter, Jim!’

Dunk looked down at his feet and spotted the end of the chainsaw sticking out through Gimlet’s armoured corpse. It would certainly make a better weapon than the thrower’s bare fists.

Dunk flipped Gimlet over and dragged the chainsaw out of his corpse. He’d never seen anything like this before, some strange amalgam of sorcery and alchemy, he guessed. Still, if a creature like Gimlet could run it, then perhaps Dunk could too.

He fumbled with the contraption for a moment until his hands found the proper grip on it. How had Gimlet turned the thing on? Dunk had been too far down the field to see the chainsaw start up.

‘It looks like Hoffnung has decided turnabout is fair play, Bob.’

‘Too bad no one engraved a set of instructions on the side of that thing!’

Dunk cursed and glared up at the announcers’ box, high above the stadium’s north flank. It was bad enough he couldn’t figure out the damned thing without disembodied voices mocking him in front of thousands of people.

Then an odd thought struck Dunk. He turned the chainsaw over on its side. There, just under the left handle, someone had scratched a set of instructions: ‘Grab left handle. Pull chain with right.’

Dunk looked at the serrated chain running along the outside of the blade. He couldn’t imagine anyone would want to grab that to get the thing going. Not even a Chaos worshipper like Gimlet could be that willing to risk his fingers every time.

‘Try the T-grip,’ Guillermo said.

Dunk almost leapt from his armour at the sound of the Hacker’s voice behind him. He swung the chainsaw around to smack the man but managed to recognise him in time. ‘Where in the Chaos Wastes did you come from?’ he said.

Guillermo tossed a thumb back at the stands. ‘Been hiding in the crowd.’

Dunk scowled as he looked for this ‘T-grip’ Guillermo had mentioned. ‘They didn’t pass you up over the edge?’

‘Too busy watching the show.’

Guillermo tapped a fist-long wooden dowel dangling from the right side of the chainsaw’s handle. Like most of the rest of the machine, it was stained with fresh blood. Dunk reached down and grabbed it with his right hand. Bracing the chainsaw in his left hand, he hauled back on the T-grip with all his might, and the smoke-belching beast roared to life.

Dunk nodded his thanks to Guillermo over the machine’s deafening roar and turned to see Krader and M’Grash pummelling each other to death. The ogre seemed to be getting the worse of it, which was no surprise. The troll had a couple of feet of height on him and countless pounds. Worse yet, Dunk could see every wound M’Grash inflicted on the troll was already healing. The same couldn’t be said for the half-dozen gashes Dunk spotted in the ogre’s hide.

‘Let’s finish this!’ Dunk said, charging forward with the chainsaw buzzing in his hands.

As he approached the massive combatants, though, he saw the Jumboball start to move again.

‘Gee, Jim,’ Bob’s voice said, ‘that hardly seems fair.’

Click here to buy Dead Ball

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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

Cover illustration by Max Bertolini.

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ISBN: 978-1-78251-927-0

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