Another Point of Singularity

Our first entry is from ONCE UPON A CRIME, a collection of short crime stories by various prominent mystery authors. The short stories all center around a fairy tale motif, taking classic fairy tales from Anderson and Grimm and reimagining them as crime stories. It's a funny little book. Publisher Berkley, Copyright 1998 Trade edition.

From the short story OLD SULTAN by Mat Coward, page 88 (this is actually more than the official paragraph, but because Coward was writing with only single sentence paras, I combined a few to make a nice starter chunk).

No one had ever called Sultan a nice guy. He didn't even think of himself-- on those very rare occasions when he thought about himself at all-- as a nice guy. But loyal, yes. He thought of himself as loyal, and he thought that others thought of him that way, too. You din't have to be nice to do his job, was the way Sultan looked at it, but you DID have to be loyal

Have at it! I'll be posting results here next Friday.