thames from ‘tamesis’ a latinisation of brythonic meaning ‘dark water’ you are walking beside the river at limehouse looking onto the reach known as the lower pool of london its turbid speculum discloses nothing before it was embanked the thames flowed wider and more shallowly in the roman period nearly twice as broad a person standing on this spot would be neck-deep in thames mud tide rising high overhead across blind eyeballs the eddies of capital swirling in the wakes of trading ships to the west the weight of skyscrapers fractures the contemporary city’s carapace of glass and steel the cracks re-establish london’s medieval street pattern east and canary wharf’s towers haul themselves from the marsh of the isle of dogs you are standing by the thames at wapping ‘wappa inge’ old english meaning ‘wappa’s people’ named for an elder or founder of the early medieval settlement here on the foreshore a saxon is carving runes onto the prow of his boat taking great care he knows that one syntax error might compromise the spell he’s inscribing if the vessel will be used for trade beached on the strand and used as an improvised market stall as many are in the nearby port of lundenwic and if in his programming he accidentally interchanged a plus and minus the spell might go berserk the stall would build exponentially bigger trading positions no longer correcting for excess in a matter of seconds a fortune could be lost the merchant would have to smash the runes with an axe to rescue the whole kingdom’s economy you ask the runewright to teach you a spell what sort of magic would you like
• a rune for acquiring boundless wealth
• a rune to detect dangerous necromancy in your area
