The best stories in the book are those that manage to take the abstract theme of a city forged in the blood of its outsiders and render it in telling detail. The solitary fisherman plaiting grass into a skirt for camouflage, the ambitious Roman sent to barbaric Britain to test the purity of coins for forgery, convince us most with their little observations of the world around them. The city's tragedies, victories, and atrocities are related in layer upon layer of brushstrokes —

The body of a murder victim adrift on the river: "It's like a big hand, dragging it's fingers through frog-coloured water, tufts of black hair growing there between them."

Simon Senlis, embittered veteran of the Crusades, surveys the foundation of the church he builds for the Knights Templar: "I step nearer the ring of piers that soar up massively into the starless dark towards their rounded many-scalloped capitals. Between the eight great columns now the yawning chasm of the open crypt..."

A witch explains why certain mushrooms cause visions: "Lightning is the spend of God that strikes an ash tree, where His seeds grow up, with rounded heads and slender tails, between the roots. A woman or a man may take these spendings in their mouth and after have the Sight, so that they may put all their thoughts into a fire, to travel with its smoke towards the sky."

Moore himself comments on the same starry sky after embarking on his own drug-induced derangement of the senses: "Long rags of cirrus snag upon the arc of night, an interrupted glimpse of grace through veils of fume and soot."  continue...