"A good game, all in all," Edwyrd said, breathless. "You kept them pinned down, and didn't give them opportunities for passing manoeuvres. Just one thing. One tiny thing. When you form into a tunnel around your opponents at the end of the match, you're just supposed to applaud them. Not use your strategic advance to attack them from all sides and beat them viciously to death."
An arrow whistled past his head. He kept running.
"Dey were only elves, kotch," Grobb said.
"Elves have feelings too," Edwyrd snapped back, ducking under a low-hanging tree branch. "Feelings…and…deadly projectiles, as it turns out."
"Look on the bright side," Cressida said. She leapt nimbly up onto a fallen trunk, swung from the nearest branch, and dropped down into the grass. "This is great agility training. Is...er...Badpipes all right?"
The troll, who had lifted up the cart in two massive hands, glanced at her, smiled, and continued to ambled through the foliage. There was a long white-feathered arrow sticking through his head.
"I don't think it hit anything that matters," Edwyrd said.
He dared to glance back over his shoulder. "Thank the gods, they've falling back into the trees. Slow down, guys. Everyone all right? Nobody's missing? Nobody's dead?"
"I fink I...uh…?"
"You ain't dead, Grobb," said Wazguttle. "If you's talkin', you ain't dead. Dat's what dey call a telltale sign." He tapped the side of his head knowingly.
Edwyrd was shaking his head as they stepped out of the treeline and into the sunlight of the grassy roadside.
"We're going to need to have a serious discussion," he said, "about discipline. Flirksmasher, I saw you toss that Wardancer into the side of an oak tree. How do you think you might be able to avoid that kind of situation developing in the future?"
Flirksmasher lowered his gaze and thought for some time.
"Before the match," he said slowly, "we burn down all der forests."
He almost walked into - and over - Fourtooth, who had come to an abrupt halt directly ahead, his pipe dangling from his gobsmacked mouth.
"Well," he mumbled, "would you look at that?"
Edwyrd's stomach churned.
Far ahead, past mossy hilltops and ruin-strewn crags, tiny birds circling high above...was a city of lights. At its heart, like a colossal glowing egg nestling in a bed of spikes, was the curved dome of the Chaos Cup stadium.
And, stretching out from one horizon to the other along the length of the cobbled merchant's trail they called Buckman's Road, was a convoy unlike anything Edwyrd had ever seen.
Humans, lizardmen, elves, dwarves, orcs, species he didn't even recognise, all of them dressed in the vivid colours of their chosen team. By the roadside, hawkers, merchants and rogues were peddling their variously crappy wares, from team shirts to life-size cardboard models of Morg'N'Thorg.
As the Oldboyz watched, a party of Bright Wizards in Reikland Reavers gear, cheering, let off a series of small aerial explosions that formed briefly into the shape of Griff Oberwald's face.
"We ain't gon' have ter go to der back of dat, are we, kotch?" asked Grobb. "Cos o' fair play an' respekterbilty an' dat uvver stuff yoo's always goin' on about."
Edwyrd thought about it.
"Nah," he said, at last. "Let's get cuts."