Randall sat back down at the table. There remained plenty of the hellish swill in his bowl. His stomach began to twist around like a balloon animal being formed. He could almost sense the soup mocking his taste buds, daring them to come closer ... closer....
There had to be someplace else to get rid of the soup. His pants seemed like a poor choice, though he was willing to try it if no other option surfaced.
The king lifted his bowl to his lips and began to slurp the remainder of the soup. Alan did the same. Randall lifted his bowl, shouted “Nervous twitch!” and hurled it across the room. The bowl shattered against the wall.
“Sorry.”
“That's quite a twitch you've got there,” King Irving remarked.
“I know. It's a terrible burden in social situations. Especially romantic ones. You'd be amazed how many amorous moments have been disrupted by my punching a potential lover. Though on one occasion it led our relationship into a whole new area.”
“I'll have some more soup brought out to you,” said King Irving.
“No, that's okay. I need to teach my body a lesson or it'll never learn. I really should be fasting, anyway. It's Saturday, right?”
“Monday.”
“Yep, two days after Saturday on the dot. No food for me.”
“Well,” said the king, “I guess the meal is over. Time to get back to my royal duties, unless you have anything else you'd like to say.”
Randall glanced down at the necklace and remembered his whole reason for being here. “There's a little something, I guess. Nothing important. A tiny tidbit of information I'd like to glean, if you don't mind.”
“Let me guess. Believing that you've gained my trust, you're going to very cleverly try to get me to reveal the secret location of the treasure chest I keep hidden in my room, so that you can steal it quickly after sneaking into my room tonight and slitting my throat, right?”
Randall's blood went cold. “The necklace is a giveaway, isn't it?”
“Yes. Those guys try the same old stuff, week after week. When will they learn?”
Randall tried to emit a good-natured chuckle. “So, I can safely assume that you're aware I was forced into this situation? I mean, I am Sir William's squire.”
“What do you think, Alan?”
“Nothing good, Your Highness.”
“I'm serious,” Randall insisted. “There's this bug, and it saved me from dying in the desert, and the Ricks are holding it hostage unless I work for them!”
“So you're putting a bug above a king?” asked Alan.
“Just now thinking that over, it does sound pretty bad, doesn't it? But I wasn't going to go through with it! I was going to raise an alarm at the last second, giving you a chance to catch the Ricks in the act!”
“I'm sorry,” said the king, shaking his head. “I'm afraid I'm going to have to notify King Waldo of Mosiman that the squire Randall was executed for treason.”
“Notify. Okay. But, in reality, you're just going to banish me, right?”
“No. We're going to guillotine you. Alan, see to it that our guest is given accommodations in our dungeon.”
Chapter 14
A Bummer Situation For Randall
HANDS CHAINED behind his back and two guards flanking him, Randall followed Alan down the spiraling stone stairs into darkness. Spiders scurried in and out of cracks in the wall. A bat flew overhead. A boll weevil got crushed beneath Alan's foot.
After several spirals, they reached the bottom of the stairs and the doorway to the dungeons. They waited a few minutes for the spiral-induced dizziness to wear off and for one of the guards to be sick in private, and then proceeded forward, where they were met by another guard. His skin was burnt all over, and he wore an eyepatch. Unfortunately, he was wearing the eyepatch as a makeshift jockstrap, and it didn't cover nearly enough for Randall's happiness.
The burnt guard gave them a savage grin. “Torture or execution?”
“Execution,” Alan replied, “but I think he could do with a bit of torture first.”
“Good.” The burnt guard took a piece of paper off a nearby desk. “Fill out this torture request form in triplicate, and he'll be taken care of.”
A piercing shriek came from the dungeon area.
“Get him to scream louder!” shouted the burnt guard.
The shriek got louder.
“Increase the pitch!”
The pitch increased.
“Get him to scream ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb'!”
No response.
The burnt guard scowled. “Torturers today, they can't even get a prisoner to shriek a nursery rhyme. In my heyday, we'd have six prisoners singing that in perfect harmony and with all the correct lyrics.”
“Here you go,” said Alan, handing him the paper.
The burnt guard looked it over. “Ah, another crony of the H.L.K.U.A.K. movement. When will they learn?”
After Alan and the two guards left, Randall was led down a long hallway, where miserable-looking prisoners sat in their cells doing nothing. “It's Learn-To-Quilt Week,” said the burnt guard, “but none of them seem to be getting into it. Their loss, I say.”
At the end of the hallway, they rounded a corner. “This is our torture area,” the burnt guard explained. “But here in Rainey Dungeon, we're not just barbarians into physical pain. No, we realize the impact of mental torture as well.”
He stopped by one of the cells. A prisoner was chained to the wall while a pair of torturers stood in front of him.
“You're worthless,” said one.
“You're not just worthless, you're completely worthless,” said the other.
“And nobody likes you.”
“Nobody at all.”
“And you were adopted.”
“By accident.”
The burnt guard continued moving, leading Randall down to the cell at the end of the hall. He shoved him inside, where another pair of guards were waiting. “This is Bob and Ben,” the burnt guard said. “They don't like people.”
Bob and Ben were twins, except that Ben was a little uglier. Not too much, just enough that a casual observer might think that Ben had taken a slightly larger sip of the Ugly Broth at birth. They were both large men, with enormous muscles everywhere one cared to look. They both had exactly one eyebrow each. They had one tooth between them (and Bob was using it at the moment). Their combined stench was enough to explode a small animal from twenty feet away.
“Hello to you, my friend to be. It's too bad you're not here for tea,” said Bob, in a sing-song pattern.
The burnt guard slammed the cell door shut. “He's going to be executed tomorrow,” he said, “so make sure there's enough left of his head to chop off.”
“We shall do that, I'm sure you know. For we are men who run the show.”
“Will you knock it off?” asked Ben. He turned to Randall. “You can't even have a lousy conversation with this guy.”
“My speech is what makes me unique. Into my soul it gives a peek.”
Ben motioned to an unsturdy-looking wooden chair. “Have a seat,” he told Randall. “We'll get started.”
“Yes please sit down, oh one to die. So we can make you want to cry.”
“I'm going to make your ugly face cry if you don't start talking like a normal person instead of some poetry freak.”
“You know the way I feel for rhyme. I like to say them all the time.”
“Can you believe this guy?” Ben asked Randall. “Oh, he thinks he's all impressive, but try to get him to say something he hasn't said a million times already. Watch this. Hey, Bob, what's your opinion of a moose?”
“I must admit I don't like moose. I think that they...” He thought for a moment. “...are far too loose.”