Spirits in the SiliconCyberpunk Byzantium

The books

Two novellas and a trilogy

The novellas are self‑contained cases — a night's work each, in a city where a night's work can get a man killed twice. They also set the fuse for the trilogy.

Out now Cover of Thirty Pieces of Silver: a man in a long coat leans against a wall on a rain-slick neon street beneath a domed cathedral.

Novella One · Available now

Thirty Pieces of Silver

Travis J. I. Corcoran & Lawrence Railey

“When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.” Inscribed on the reliquary · James 1:13–15

Constantinople sleeps off the Epiphany. The festivals have burned down to guttering brasiers; the bishops and monks and the heretics handing out microdisks of their outlawed sermons have all gone to bed. Only the drunks are still out, watched over by the neon‑striped airships of His Majesty's Imperial police and the cataphracts of ancient fame, patrolling the Old City on horseback.

In the fog at the Harbour of Theodosius, a fixer named Symeon Doukas is waiting for a cyberneticist who is late. There is an ex‑military Venetian hauler at the quay, the Giove Fulminante, and in the captain's quarters there is a golden reliquary holding one of the original thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot.

Getting aboard is a matter of drones, looped camera footage, and doing exactly what the voice in his ear tells him. Getting off again is a different problem — because the route out runs through a brig the manifest swore was empty, and the woman locked in it is begging him for help he cannot afford to give.

A standalone novella, and the shortest way into the Empire that never fell. It ends where the rest of the sequence begins: in a run‑down church in the slums, with a priest who has a proposition.

Format eBook, paperback, hardcover Publisher Morlock Publishing Year 2024
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“You're going to be looking down from above, controlling my motions as I dodge enemy fire… like a teenager playing some video game. How many lives do I get?”

“One. Which will be enough — but only if you do exactly as I say.” Thirty Pieces of Silver

Coming soon Cover of Divine Transmission: two people bent over a glowing brass valve radio in a cluttered workshop, beneath an icon of Christ and a neon cross.

Novella Two · Coming soon

Divine Transmission

Travis J. I. Corcoran & Lawrence Railey

“Hold, for the faithful endure against the darkness. Your help will come from where you do not look.” The voice on the radio · New World, 1475

Three months after the business on the docks, Symeon is still living at the top of his slum tower, and Antonia is still sleeping on the couch with her belongings in a bag. He has finally cleared her a shelf. Neither of them will say the word for what they are.

Then Father Basil slides two things across his desk: an icon of St. Theodoros of the Horn, and a photograph of a radio. A squat brass cabinet with rounded shoulders, two tall exposed valves, an amber tuning dial, and the Mother of God painted on the side. In 1475 a chaplain cranked it through a siege in the New World and a calm woman's voice came out of the static and told the defenders to hold. By morning they had been brought off alive. The Church calls it a Marian miracle: technology as a vessel for the divine word.

It has been stolen. The shrine is shut and the sign says renovations. The Church cannot use its own people — the broker is a Venetian defector who does business with heretics, and the heretics have brought a machine to the meeting that can tell when a man is lying.

Symeon takes the job because he always takes the job. What he does not tell anyone is the question he has not been able to put down since he saw the photograph: the machine in the picture is under power. What would a man hear, if he turned it on?

Status In production Cover Final Follows Thirty Pieces of Silver
Start with Novella One
In progress Concept cover for Heretics of the Catacombs: a figure in an armoured jacket looks back over her shoulder at a gold-lit dome rising through the fog.

Book One of the trilogy

Heretics of the Catacombs

Travis J. I. Corcoran & Lawrence Railey

Symeon checked the glowing purple indicator on his pistol's scope, muttered a silent prayer to Saint Michael, and turned the corner. There was a flash of colour through the drizzling rain — an orange cloak, vanishing into an open steel door. Heretics of the Catacombs, chapter one

The first full‑length novel in the sequence. It opens the way the city opens: at a run, down the Mese, through an incense shop full of broken glass, past goat herds and hovercraft and ten thousand holy‑day shoppers, chasing a cloak the colour of heresy.

What starts as a day's work becomes an investigation; the investigation becomes a heresy; and the heresy goes down — beneath the shopfronts and the shrines, beneath the Old City itself, into the catacombs, where certain people have been keeping their presses, their prayers, and their machines out of the light for a very long time.

Symeon is a small man in a system much larger than he is. He is not going to win. He may, if he is lucky and very stubborn, find a little redemption in acts of individual kindness — and drag the truth up into the neon before the Empire decides it would rather not know.

Length Novel Position Book one of three Status In progress

Cover studies

Heretics of the Catacombs cover study: a woman looking back at a golden dome
Heretics of the Catacombs cover study: three hooded figures with glowing masks in an arcade
Heretics of the Catacombs cover study: an armoured soldier in a red cloak on a neon street

Three studies for the first novel. The final cover is not yet chosen.

And after

Three books, one long fall

The trilogy is contracted and outlined. What follows is the shape of it, not the substance — you will want to meet the shape for yourself.

Book One

Heretics of the Catacombs

A relic hunter is handed a case that is not a case. He crosses a threshold he cannot re‑cross, learns what he is really chasing, and pays for the knowledge.

Book Two

Untitled

Two masters. One tells him to dig; the other tells him to stop. Only one of them is telling him the truth about why — and the border is mobilising for a war nobody can explain.

Book Three

Untitled

What the catacombs have been keeping is not a heresy but the blasphemy: a mind that no God breathed into, awake in the silicon. Men have done the one work reserved to Heaven — and they meant it as worship.

Start at the beginning

Thirty Pieces of Silver

One night, one ship, one reliquary, and a woman who was not on the manifest.

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