Cyberpunk Byzantium Spirits in the Silicon

Constantinople sleeps off the Epiphany. The brasiers have guttered, the best customs officers are sleeping off their drinks, and a Venetian cargo hauler rides at anchor in the Harbour of Theodosius with something priceless in the captain's quarters: one of the original thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas, sealed in a golden reliquary.

Symeon Doukas — disgraced nobility, relic hunter, the man the Warren calls the Stylite — has one night, one earpiece, and one paranoid cyberneticist whispering him past the patrols. It should have been clean.

Then he opens a cell in the brig that the manifest said was empty.

Three months on, the Church has lost something and cannot be seen looking for it: a vacuum‑tube radio of 1475, carried through a siege in the New World by a chaplain who would later be made a saint. When he cranked it, a woman's voice came out of the static and told the defenders to hold — that their help would come from where they did not look. By morning they had been brought off alive.

The shrine is shut for "renovations." The broker selling the relic is a Venetian defector with heretic friends and a machine that knows when a man is lying. And Symeon, who has never entirely believed a word a priest has told him, is going to do the one thing nobody thought to forbid.

He is going to switch it on.

A foot chase down the Mese ends in an incense shop full of broken glass. It should have been a day's work. Instead it is a thread, and the thread runs down — under the shopfronts and the shrines, under the Old City itself, into the catacombs where the heretics keep their presses and their prayers and their machines.

The first full‑length novel in the sequence, and the beginning of a trilogy in which the Empire discovers what has been thinking in its wires.