This is the second story I wrote in my 'one a day' week during my time in London. See Looking East for the first one.

READING THE BOOK

Finally, the Book was mine. After so long: after years of waiting, planning, investigating. Thousands of pounds spent. Romantic and platonic relationships ruined. After thefts, threats, violence, deception, and after committing crimes too heinous to recount, finally I held the Book in trembling hands.

It was huge and heavy. Quarto format and approximately one thousand pages thick. The cover was leather of some sort. Crudely cured and even more crudely bound to the Book, it had split in several places and been inexpertly stitched back together. Whatever colour it had originally been was now impossible to tell. Currently it was a dirty brown, covered in darker stains, pinhole burns and tiny bleached pits. The title, if the cover had ever shown it, was now no longer visible. That, however, was immaterial, as anyone who would desire to read the Book already knew its name. It was the Libris Necrodei: The Library of the Dead God, and now it and the forbidden knowledge it contained were mine.

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This story dates from 2004. There's not much to say about it. I redrafted it a couple of times, but was never satisfied enough with the outcome.

FAR, FAR AWAY

Have you ever loved something so much that it seems to fill you somehow? A piece of music, or poem, book, story, painting? Something like that? I have. I used to, anyway. The attraction has faded somewhat over the last few years. I used to love all sorts of art. Some pieces of art were so perfect that I'd spend hours looking at them, learning every brushstroke or every nuance of light and shadow. I'd get so engrossed in a song or piece of music that I'd put earphones on, turn the stereo up as loud as I could stand and just let it play, over and over, for hours on end. Poems and books would captivate me so thoroughly that I'd sit all day for a week and read non-stop.

Plato wouldn't like the way we venerate artists so much. I'm not a great student of philosophy, but I know a little bit about some of it. Plato thought that artists were con-men essentially. His theory of forms, as I understand it (and I may well be reading it wrongly) says that somewhere ephemeral is the perfect form of everything (bed, table, blade of grass and so on), and that what we see are just imperfect copies of it. Plato said that mimetic art was worthless because it was an imperfect copy of an already imperfect copy. Of course, he said that only philosophers could ever see through to the 'Perfect Form' of things, so I'm not sure we can really trust him to be impartial. And I'm sure that if he was alive now, he'd think differently - how can you fail to be entranced by Yo Yo Ma's playing, or Hopper's paintings? I guess it's all a matter of taste, but still.

Where was I? Sorry, my mind wanders quite a lot lately, and I lose track of what I was saying. Oh, yes, I remember now. Art, in all its forms, used to absolutely enthral me. Didn't matter what medium, I loved some of it to distraction. That sort of thing can be very dangerous though.

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This is another 'one a day' story. (Looking East and Reading The Book are other examples.) I gave myself an hour and a half for this one, and I was fast running out of time by the end, which is why the last few paragraphs feel so rushed.

FOLLOWING THE ROAD

She ran, settling into the easy, loping stride that ate up distance and that she could keep up all day. It was three hundred miles from Central Province to Alaman, and she meant to cover it in as many days. Conventional wisdom said that Wayrunners could cover seventy miles a day at most. The fastest anyone had ever made it to Alaman was four days, a record set thirty years previously by Josef Al'catan, and at the time, he was a clear day faster than anyone else.

That day's lead had been cut considerably in the last three decades. She'd nearly matched it herself, once arriving just over an hour after the gates had been sealed for the night (and had had to spend an uncomfortable night sleeping on the Road), but no one had matched the record, let alone beaten it.

This time though, she wasn't intending to match the record, or even just beat it. She was going to shatter it. To make it in three days meant she'd have to cover a hundred miles a day. She'd have to start running at dawn, and maybe even carry on after dark, as dangerous as that was, if it meant making the next bunkhouse. Luckily, it was high summer - the solstice tomorrow - and this was her last assignment before her triweek rest period, so she'd be able to push herself harder than usual, as she could take her time recovering. Her only worry was injury. A broken ankle or dislocated knee had ended many a Wayrunner's career, and although she had plans for when she retired (open a tavern and Wayhouse) she didn't intend that to be for a decade or more yet, and in any case, she couldn't afford it now.

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This is the first of my 'story a day' stories from when I was living in London. It's sci-fi, I suppose, but about as far from 'hard' sci-fi as you can get. I'm currently planning another, longer story, set in the same world.

LOOKING EAST

It was time, and past time. The song of the bulrushes awoke me to the terrible incandescent beauty of the Final Dawn. The lime green sky seemed luminescent as a flock of arcwind gulls flew overhead, burned to silhouette by the brightness of the morning firmament: flapping, craul-ing shadows.

- Late in the year for arcwinds to be flying - Alfon said quietly as I headed back into the rockhouse. - If they don't go in the next few days they'll likely be trapped under Darkness. Not much chance of them surviving if that happens. Nothing for them to eat. Mackryll are all gone already, and Korbs are near impossible to spot without daylight. There's our refuse of course, but -

I grunted and tuned him out. Alfon would talk for hours if I let him, telling me about marine ecosystems, migratory patterns, population forecasts: more information than anyone needed, and certainly more than I cared about first thing in the morning. I hadn't even had a glass of coffee yet.

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