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that kept me together. The torments affected by my captors
were growing less fanciful and more forceful—a typical and
predictable escalation once the imagination fades. There
wasn’t much imagination between the triplets, perhaps less
than what one might hope to find blowing about within the
most average of heads. No, the engine that powered this
Prince of Smoke was little more than the combined powers
of greed and glory—two vices that were as correlated
as flesh and bone. Of course, as the Deadworld loves its
petty ironies, their vainglory would most certainly be their
unseating. I would see to it, loath though I was to do the
Deadworld’s work.
There were always several of the hired guns milling about
the room where I had been showcased. The triplets must
have been wealthy, indeed. Given all the noise they made, I
was left without a proper healing silence, so I made do with
scraps. Unfortunately, whatever progress a night’s efforts of
sipping at silence gave me was immediately stripped away
the following day, as lash and hammer and knife saw to the
lessening—and then some—of my night’s recovery.
On what night I cannot say, there came a quiet that stoked
the coldest fire within me—I could no longer hear the lament
of my poor sisters. Did they think their brother dead? Or
worse, did they believe I had abandoned them? I would be
free that very night, I swore it.
As had become routine for the closing of the evening, the
thin men came to me, boasting of their most recent success
at “cheating the Shepherd’s Game,” as they called it. I saw
their technique as one of many perfectly valid strategies that
could be used to win—I couldn’t fathom how one cheats at a
cosmic game of mass murder.
“After that last fish, I’d say our worm isn’t long for the
world, eh?” spoke the leader of the three. He was referencing
the Wolf that had come for me the night prior. A killer known
as the Baker’s Man had killed the first round of hired hands
and managed to spend a minute or so trying to cut me from
240 | Mark Anzalone