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  Scrape to Victory – Gav Thorpe

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  A Black Library Publication

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  Scrape to Victory

  by Gav Thorpe

  ‘Kikkit!’

  The sound of Oversneer Skreet bellowing his name made him flinch, expecting an accompanying blow or lash. Early life in the slave pits had given him certain instincts that no amount of time in the higher tunnels could overcome. It had also taught him swift reflexes, honed a sharp mind and developed an incorrigible sense of self-preservation, character traits that had served him well as he had clawed his way – often literally – to his current place within the hierarchy of Crookback Mountain.

  As one of the clanrats working in the verminhive, his life was tedious, painful and fraught with the politicking of his ambitious companions. All of which was preferable to constant whippings and beatings, the peril of being fed to the rat ogres when supplies fell low, or suffering random and potentially lethal mutation while mining the warpstone deposits.

  Yes, all in all, his lot had improved much.

  Shoulders hunched, ears flat to his head, Kikkit looked around from the bench where he had been working – filing cog teeth along with thirty other workers for shipments to the factory-workshops of Clan Skryre in Skavenblight.

  ‘Yes-yes, oversneer?’

  The burly skaven responsible for second shift bared yellowing teeth in a broad grin. It looked awfully similar to the oversneer’s grimace of anger, so Kikkit kept his posture and expression neutral. The clanrats to either side of him surreptitiously moved a little further away, leaving him in a void of his own uncertainty.

  ‘It’s official, Kikkit,’ said Skreet, waving a rag of parchment covered in the ink scratchings of the skaven. ‘The commission of the Southern Cabal of Associated Blood Bowl have released the latest figures. You, Kikkit, my mangy little rat, have forty-two confirmed injuries to a downed opponent.’

  A ragged cheer went up at this announcement and Kikkit allowed himself a pant of happiness.

  ‘I knew-knew that goblin would count,’ he crowed, jabbing a finger toward Snarlitt. ‘Forty-two! One more and I’ll have the league record!’

  ‘That’s right, you scrawny backstabber. Nobody in the history of SCABB has kicked more people when they’re down.’

  ‘And the Crookback Cretins is through to the final,’ squeaked Chuchuk, waving his rusty spanner. ‘Win that and it’s a place in the Blood Bowl tournament itself!’

  This roused another desultory cheer, and a few sour glances. The Grey Seers had, to a certain degree, lavished praise and attention on Kikkit and the others that had made the grade to be linesmen in the Cretins. Kikkit had more warpstone and gold than he had ever known, which wasn’t saying much seeing as he had known so little in the past. But it had bred resentment too, in those that had to cover his shift while he was playing, particularly on the long journeys across the mountains or the Dark Lands.

  Kikkit didn’t care though. The elbows in his ribs at the trenchers, the tacks left by his bedding, the urine in his daily ration of teatwater. Even the risk of death and injury at the hands of some orc or ogre player were worth the risk because he had, rolled up and hidden in his most secret place behind the bilge pumps, an invitation for a try-out at the Skavenblight Scramblers.

  It was conditional on getting the ‘Most Injuries of a Downed Opponent’ record at the end of the season.

  Never mind the Cretins reaching the Blood Bowl, they would get annihilated in their first match, most likely literally. But the Scramblers… They were his tunnel out of Crookback to the life of a full-time professional Blood Bowl player.

  ‘Kikkit!’

  The growl of the oversneer snapped him from his reverie.

  ‘Back to work, you maggot-ridden furbag, the final’s not until tomorrow. Shift doesn’t end ’til sundown.’

  ‘Yes-yes, oversneer,’ replied Kikkit, bending back to his task. As he rasped his file between the points of a large gear, his thoughts drifted away again, picturing piles of gold coins, warpstone tokens, and platters upon platters of food with hardly any mould on it.

  The Big League beckoned.

  The howl of the ratwolves signalled dusk and the end of second shift. Kikkit left in the scrum with the others, casually biting and scratching his neighbours as they pressed through the narrow workshop entrance, battling against the flow of the other shift trying to get in.

  He loitered for a moment outside the feeding hall, content to let the others push in front. It was a big match tomorrow and his gut felt shrivelled, his appetite absent.

  Watching his fellow clanrats punching and wrestling each other to get at the sagging trenchers reminded him of the day he had caught the eye of the Grey Seers. It had been just such a dinnertime, he had been ravenous after a long day of toil, and in the eating melee he had spied one of his companions on his back, dazed by a blow. Kikkit had leapt, ducked and climbed through the sprawl to snatch a rancid chicken from the downed skaven.

  It was, on reflection, pretty much the same as trying to get the ball from under a pile of players, and it was his natural timing and ruthlessness that had earned his place among the Crookback Cretins and now saw him so close to achieving his dreams.

  It was with a bit of a swagger that he turned away from the food hall and headed through the twisting gnaw-tunnels to the chambers of Nyak Longtooth. As he turned into the corridor where the cave of his representative lived – his ‘agent’, Nyak insisted, though he was nothing more than a loan-ratshark – Kikkit slowed, suddenly aware that something was amiss. Usually, the curtained door to the warlock’s laboratory was guarded by Nulk, Nyak’s huge rat ogre. There was no sign of Nulk but the flicker of warpstone light betrayed movement inside the chamber.

  ‘Nyak?’ He tugged aside the ragged curtain and poked his twitching nose into the room.

  His eye was first drawn to the broken crucibles and scattered pieces of magical equipment on the floor. Next he noticed the shattered glass vials and alembics on the warlock’s experimenting bench. His gaze flicked back to the stone floor. Was that fresh blood?

  He took all of this in at the same time that he registered the three figures standing just inside the doorway. Two were skaven a little larger than Kikkit, dressed in the thick hide aprons, gloves and kilts of Clan Moulder packmasters. They had coiled whips at their belts. One had a long ragged scar down the side of his face, his front teeth prominent even for a ratman. The other wore thick goggles of scratched green glass, his right hand replaced with a crude angled hook of iron.

  The third figure was Nulk, looming over Kikkit with ropes of drool hanging from his bared fangs.

  ‘Sorry! Wrong-wrong turn,’ shrieked Kikkit, spinning around to leave.

  ‘Not so quick-quick. Grab him, Nulk!’

  Kikkit knew better than to run and instead went limp, becoming an unresisting furry sack of bones as a massive clawed fist snatched up the loose skin at the scruff of his neck. The rat ogre lifted, presenting him to the two packmasters.

  ‘Got ’im,’ rumbled Nulk.

  ‘What has we got here, Packmaster Kratch?’ said goggles.

  ‘One of Nyak’s “assets”, I think, Packmaster Snurk,’ said Kratch.

  ‘No-no, no-no, not-not asset, not-not me. Just worker, mangy rat, yes-yes, mangy furry maggot. No-nobody.’

  ‘Star player, I hear,’ said Kratch.

  ‘Most injuries of a downed opponent, that’s the talk,’ said Snurk.

  Kikkit said nothing, dangling sullenly from Nulk’s fist. Snurk stepped closer, the smell
of warpstone on his breath as he whispered in Kikkit’s ear.

  ‘Nyak got a little greedy, he did.’

  ‘Greedy,’ echoed Kratch.

  ‘Nulk here wasn’t cheap, was he?’

  ‘No, Snurk, he was not.’

  ‘And the wolfrats. And the warstoats. And the diremice. It all adds up, it does.’

  ‘More than a few gold crowns and warpstone tokens, let me tell you,’ chuckled Kratch.

  ‘That little contract of yours? The one you had with Nyak? It’s ours now.’

  ‘Right-right.’ Kikkit nodded ferociously and started to swing in Nulk’s grip. ‘Fair to me.’

  ‘And you owed Nyak thirty thousand gold crowns.’

  ‘Thirty…’ Kikkit swallowed hard.

  ‘The loans for your kit, the warpstone poultices to heal you afterwards, representation with the Grey Seers, and forty per cent of your winnings. We’ll take fifty thousand and call it even, yes-yes?’

  ‘Fifty thousand… Where-where am I supposed to get-get that much?’

  Kratch grinned and it was not a pleasant sight. He poked a broken claw into Kikkit’s malnourished pot belly and then squeezed the clanrat’s scrawny arm muscles.

  ‘I think we could do a thing or two with a body like this. More than just fodder for the beasts.’

  Kikkit shuddered, knowing well what happened to skaven that ended up on the operating tables of the Moulder packmasters.

  ‘Right-right, fifty thousand. No problems. Big match tomorrow. Final. Win-win, big prize.’

  ‘Yes, win-win, big prize indeed,’ said Snurk with a curled lip. He pulled a bonesaw from the pocket of his apron. Rust flaked from the old blade. ‘Or else it’s the chop for you, star player.’

  Along with the rest of the team, Kikkit crammed into the dingy caves that served as the changing rooms for Crookback’s algae-carpeted Blood Bowl pitch. The sunlight coming through the slits overhead made him squint, but it was league rules that all finals were to be played above ground. He moved into the more comfortable shadow of Nulk, who doubled as their linebreaker, and strapped on fur-stuffed leather kneepads.

  The three Grey Seers, the true power of Crookback, stood on one of the benches glaring at the Cretins. Clad in thick robes, warpstone charms and looted bracelets hanging about them, staffs in hand, they stood imperiously over their minions. Their leader, Quittit, banged his rod against the mildew-slicked wood of the bench to get their attention.

  ‘Final time, worthless ratbags,’ he declared. ‘Big-big match. Win this, many, many prizes for all of us.’

  A few of the skaven gave a half-hearted cheer and pumped their fists. The others were less than enthusiastic, knowing that there was a ‘but’ to come.

  ‘But,’ continued Quittit, to a chorus of inhalations and suppressed groans, ‘lose-lose and it will be bad. Very bad-bad.’

  ‘Bad-bad,’ chorused the other two Grey Seers.

  ‘With all gifts and boons we have given you, failure means only one thing. Means you have displeased the Great Horned Rat. Means we will displease the Great Horned Rat if we tolerate your failure. So, lose-lose this match and you will all be sacrificed to the glory of the Horned One!’

  They knew better than to make any protest – even Skrankor the captain-vermin bowed his head in acceptance, darting a silencing look at his team-rats.

  The Grey Seers scuttled out, leaving a last spray of musk to remind the team who was in charge.

  ‘We history,’ groaned Thork, the first-pick thrower. ‘We never beat Morglum’s Marauders! They not conceded touchdown all season!’

  ‘They can’t defend if they can’t stand,’ snapped Kulvik, one of the gutter runners. ‘Break their legs in the first half, score in the second.’

  ‘We can do this,’ growled Skrankor, lifting up his helmet like a trophy. ‘We play terrible, hate each other, fight amongst ourselves all season, and still get to final. If we play together just once, we can win.’

  Kikkit was less confident but said nothing. He had his own plan, and it didn’t rely on beating the best team in SCABB.

  They limbered up in the dugout carved into the mountainside next to the pitch, observed by Quittit and the other coaches. They were decked in their almost uniform purple gear, the triskele daggers of the Crookback rune daubed onto their kit. Nulk was busy punching slaves into paste in one corner, while the throwers tossed a much-patched ball back and forth. On the nearby stretch of pitch the gutter runners sprinted to and fro, testing each other’s reactions with glinting throwing daggers and stars – banned during the match, of course, but good practice all the same (and ‘it’s only illegal if you get caught’ was the unofficial motto of the team).

  Skrankor and the other Stormvermin practised their gouging and biting on straw-stuffed mannequins while the clanrats loitered together performing their individual routines – desultory stretches, claw sharpening, checking their flimsy armour pads.

  Kikkit whispered the mantra that had got him to the place he was.

  ‘Kick them when they’re down. Kick them where it hurts. Kick them ’til they stop.’

  He noticed the others had stopped their warm-ups and were staring down the winding track that led into the mountains. He joined them at the edge of the dugout and saw a line of carriages making their way up the road – the visiting team.

  But he didn’t recognise the colours. Morglum’s Marauders played in black, checked with black, with a black flame motif and numbers in black. It was a singular style statement but also very confusing and… black.

  Contrary to this, the three covered wagons that swayed up the hill were decked in garlands of red and green, the grey ponies that pulled them – not snorting boars – had ribbons of the same plaited into their manes. A smell preceded the small convoy on the mountain wind, not of offal and dung that accompanied orc teams, but of roast meat and jam. The second was a bit of a guess for Kikkit as he had only ever heard of jam, never tasted it, but the sweet fruitiness that assailed his nostrils was exactly what he imagined jam would smell like.

  Kriskit, offensive coordinator, sent Chikkirt, one of his gutter runners, to investigate. The black-clad skaven hared down the track, tail twitching, and they waited in silence while he leapt from a rock up to the driving board of the lead wagon, terrifying the diminutive figure sat on it. What appeared to be a brief conversation followed and then the gutter runner raced back.

  ‘War,’ Chikkirt told them. ‘Morglum and the Marauders have joined an invasion into the Northern Wastes and have forfeited their place in the final.’

  ‘So who we playing?’ asked Skrankor.

  ‘The team they beat in the semi-finals. The Tinklebrook Trotters!’

  The team were wracked by rubbing of hands and cruel laughter at this announcement.

  Halflings! The match was as good as won.

  While the others congratulated themselves on the victory to come, Kikkit had other plans. The ability to exploit an easy win had set him on the road to success and he wasn’t about to pass up another.

  He slipped out of the dugout and back to the tunnels, ready to plead pre-game nerves for a quick break, but nobody challenged his departure. Once back in the caves of Crookback Mountain he accelerated, darting down the gnawholes to the bilge caverns beneath the warpstone mines. Here he located his hiding spot behind the creaking, wheezing pumps, dodging between the spinning gears driven by the slave wheels in the levels above.

  He found the hidey hole, removed the rotten plank that covered it and drew out his two most prized possessions. In fact his two only possessions if one didn’t consider the rags on his back and the Blood Bowl kit for which he was now in hock to the Moulder packmasters.

  First, he drew out the message from the Skavenblight Scramblers inviting him to their pre-season try-outs. He stroked the worn vellum – real ratskin! – and sniffed the blood it had been written in. Then
he pulled out a pouch containing his entire savings – a few warpstone tokens and nearly three thousand gold crowns worth of coins. It was, in Crookback terms, quite a lot of money, but nowhere near the fifty thousand he would need to buy out of his contract.

  His win bonus would not be enough, not by a long way, and even though all he needed was one more injury to a downed opponent and a one-way ticket to Skavenblight, the arrival of the halflings gave Kikkit an opening to pursue his career free from the Moulder shadow that had fallen over him. They had contacts everywhere and it would only be a matter of time before they caught up with Kikkit, possibly with interest but more likely than not determined to take their debt in flesh and blood.

  So he stuffed the savings and letter under his team shirt and headed back through the skavenhold.

  Ensuring he was not followed, he scuttled to the tunnels that led into no-rat’s-land further towards the other mountains. It was easy enough to elude the patrols of the stormvermin – nothing compared to dodging a three-line blitz coming downfield – and he headed out in the wildercaves.

  It was not long before he found the tell-tale gleam of luminous fungi that led him to the current whereabouts of Bogsnik, an itinerant night-goblin bookmaker that plied his unofficial business near the outskirts of Crookback. Guarded by a pair of ferocious squighounds, the greenskin gangster had set up his business in the undercroft beneath a waterfall of a subterranean river.

  Kikkit ducked past the water into the cave beyond, keeping flat to the wall as the squighounds snarled and drooled. A few vague shadows disappeared into the depths of the cave, doubtless other customers not wishing to be identified.

  ‘’Ello, my furry friend,’ said Bogsnik, standing behind an upturned crate covered with the remnants of a looted dwarf banner. He was hard to hear over the gushing water that echoed in the cave. ‘’Avin’ a little flutta today, are we?’

  Kikkit dragged out his savings and plonked them on the makeshift table.

  ‘All of that on the Cretins to win.’

  Now, Bogsnik no doubt prided himself on his ability to keep abreast of events and trends, but Kikkit was betting his life that news of the change of opponent had not yet reached the bookmaker.