Within the Hollow Crown (37 page)
Read Within the Hollow Crown Online
Authors: Daniel Antoniazzi
What’s
that? You’ve had enough? Fine. I’ll stop. Try to have some maturity about these things, OK?
He
kept saving so he could commission a Jolly Roger flag, but was having trouble finding someone who would agree to make one.
Congratulations
for noticing the “Sir” at the beginning of his name. Good work. Pat yourself on the back.
He
probably figured that if things had gotten that bad, there was nothing left to rule anyway.
Corthos
tried to exchange a look with Jareld, but his look got deflected off of Thor’s look, and he ended up exchanging a look with a low-hanging branch.
One
guy might say early sixties, but only because he was a jerk and knew it was a trick question.
The
worms were not so named because of their brotherly nature, but rather because they had a philosophy that was largely based on shadows on the walls of caves.
Fifty
Nibwins was a lot of money. It was enough to buy a farm and pay for one year’s salary of the man who tends to the goats (but not the goats themselves.) Eventually, this policy led to the bankruptcy of the Nibwin Kingdom.
His
attempt to capture and study one of the Platonics to prove his theory came to a lethal and very messy end.
Unfortunately
, the Scholar’s name was Master East, so while there is an East Wing in the Towers of Seneca, it is unfortunately on the East side of the Main Tower, and none of the current students are aware of the dedication.
The
merchants were furious when they found the pirates drunk, making use of a gaggle of prostitutes, and singing a bad version of the famous camp song, “How Are Things In My Aunt’s House This Fine Summer Mid-Afternoon, If You Don’t Mind My Asking?” in a round.
Furthermore
, she felt like she was losing a game of ping-pong, and she didn’t know what that game was.
Michael
had hoped there would be a sensation that could only be described as a whooshing sensation, but there wasn’t. It was just walking.
Or
so it seemed. Jareld didn’t quite understand why there was a troop of Turin soldiers, and why they wanted to kill Jareld and his friends.
Only
one person had ever won a personality contest. It was in the third century of the Kingdom, when Lord Blueberry announced that Lord Hagglemaffer was the single most unpleasant man in the Kingdom. Lord Hagglemaffer rebuffed that this would be true, if only Lord Blueberry wasn’t around.
The two journeyed together, annoying a great many people on their quest,
searching for an oracle that would listen to them. They found, on the remote island of Incenseridden, a prophet named Noseklipp.
“Step forward, gentlemen,” Noseklipp said, “And ask the question that troubles your souls.”
Lord Hagglemaffer chose that moment to fart.
“Sir prophet,” Lord Blueberry
added, “We hope you are not as useless as you are ugly.”
“That was very unpleasant,” Noseklipp said. “And it also wasn’t a question.”
“Listen,” Hagglemaffer said, “We need you to tell us which is the more pleasant of the two of us.”
“You want me to judge a personality contest?”
“Yes,” said Blueberry.
“With only the two of you as contestants?”
“Yes,” said Hagglemaffer.
Noseklipp had them perform a number of social acts, while he tried to observe from a safe distance. He set up a rigorous scoring system by which they could gain points for doing socially appropriate things and lose points for doing unsocial things. By the end of the first week of the contest, Blueberry was ahead -143,578 to -143,584. Blueberry had not lost points on one occasion, when he failed to blow his nose into the dinner turkey while urinating on the Count’s boots.
Noseklipp, unable to watch anymore, committed suicide and left a note declaring the winner of the contest. He also arranged for an assassin to put them both out of everyone else’s misery. They were buried side by side, in a small apple orchard located on the point of the planet the furthest away from anyone who knew either of them.
And
Gabriel had been around the block a few times. Gabriel had seen The Red Terror, a man dressed and body-painted entirely in green, who was colorblind and angry about it. He had seen Obblokk the Dark, a manically depressed, homicidal ninja. He had even fought, in his youth, Tur’Nak, Champion of the Fist, a man who had accidentally glued his fists shut when he was young, and since then, had perfected the art of punching people hard enough to kill them.
Unless
you were angry with them, or trying to prove a point, perhaps. In that case, you could just as easily bring home a drunken leper. It would have the same effect.
This
was particularly troublesome for a certain young couple. They had been on their honeymoon, walking along the beach, looking into one another’s eyes, when a hot spring of eternal youth popped out of the ground and burned them both.
After healing from their wounds, their lives were rather normal for a while, until they realized that neither of them was aging. They would apparently look twenty-two forever. A blessing, they thought.
But it turns out they weren’t that great of a match. And always looking so young, they each had plenty of, shall we say, other options. If they had aged normally, perhaps they would have settled for one another. But now they each felt they could do better.
They did finally get an annulment, and went off to live very promiscuous lives. He died, hundreds of years later, when his ship went down during a storm, and she died shortly after from a particularly aggressive strain of crabs.
His
voice was said to be compelling, and he had once hired a statistician to sit in the corner of lair for decades and figure out the effects of Devesant’s voice. About ten percent of the people who came to fight Devesant die of a heart attack after hearing his voice. Another thirty percent faint. The next forty percent lose control of their bladders and quiver uselessly in fear. Another nineteen plus percent shudder, then dive for cover.
Argos was the only one who had ever stood perfectly still, in complete calm, and answered with a deep voice.
The statistician, incidentally, had been devoured after thirty-six years of work, when he suggested to Devesant that, after so many years of work, he was due to retire.
