The world
Venture into the neon‑lit world of Byzantium in the futuristic year of 1754, when cybernetically augmented monks chant as they swing incense‑burning thuribles, surgically enhanced hookers flirt with hackers in underground bars, Viking mercenaries sell their guns to the highest bidder, and Aztec traders offer chocolate, gold, and illegal cocaina.
The divergence
In our world, the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 was a crushing defeat for the Romans, and the East was lost. Here it ended in a draw — and what followed was three centuries of sporadic war that neither side could win, an Empire that held Anatolia and Africa, and a Constantinople that never fell to anyone.
The technology arrives centuries early and out of order, the way real technology does: cannon before printing, aircraft before transistors, neon signage a hundred and forty years before the integrated circuit. By 1754 the Queen of Cities has cybernetic surgeons, LED mosaics in the domes, drone traffic over the harbour — and cataphracts on horseback, because some things work.
A short history of the world, as printed in the front matter of Thirty Pieces of Silver.
The map
Byzantium is the sole superpower, and nowhere near strong enough to fight everyone at once. It survives by keeping the Great Powers angry at each other.
Europe, the Mare Internum, and the Near East in 1754.
Thrace and Anatolia at the heart, the Balkans and their Great Estates, Sicily, the Catapanate of Italy, Gothia in the Crimea, and the fiercely religious Exarchate of Africa. Nobody who lives there calls it Byzantium.
Francia stands behind the Papacy and runs a spy service to match the Empire's own. Venice threw off tribute three centuries ago and now competes for every trade route. Visigothic Spain never fell and fields the better navy.
The Varangians got to the western hemisphere in 950, and European metallurgy went south with them — so the Aztec Empire is stronger here, not weaker. Japan sides with the Empire; China with the Franks.
The western hemisphere eight centuries on: the Vinland Confederation, the Haudenosaunee, Mictlampa, and the Aztec heartland.
Faith
A fragment of the True Cross. A tooth of an ancient saint. A piece of a centuries‑old transistor radio. In a civilisation that never stopped venerating, holiness has a price, a provenance, and a black market — and a man who can authenticate a relic and move it quietly will never lack for work.
The domes carry LED tesserae and the windows play the life of Christ on translucent panes, which some of the distant cities call heresy: a digital iconoclasm is sweeping the Empire. The Neo‑Paulicans hand out microdisks of outlawed sermons in the street and keep their presses in the catacombs. And in every story in this sequence there is a prophecy that comes true — though not always in the way anyone intended, and not always where the reader notices it the first time.
Politics
There is no democracy in Byzantium. There are factions — mobs, fandoms, and Motorchariot teams all at once, self‑identifying by flag and by clothing. Enough of them banding together have unmade emperors before, and every emperor knows it.
The oldest colour, and blue‑collar to the bone: mechanics, army grunts, factory hands, electricians. Rowdy, usually armed, and the colour most likely to riot effectively. Their racing teams run on raw talent because they cannot afford anything else.
The other ancient colour: doctors, lawyers, administrators, officers, cybernetics engineers. They riot rarely and devastatingly, moving like a small army. Lavishly funded chariots, second only to the Purples. They loathe the Blues on a thousand‑year schedule.
The Emperor's own faction. Higher nobles wear purple in public and support other colours in private. Few genuine believers, best‑funded teams in the Empire, and during a riot they are conspicuously somewhere else.
The poorest and the most numerous. Easy to bribe with bread and circuses, prone to violence over nothing, and impossible to coordinate. Red racers are exceptionally violent even by the sport's liberal standards, and do not live long.
The devout, drawn from every class. The last colour to take to the street — which is why, when the Whites march, everybody notices. Their chariots are painted white and gold and hung with icons.
Heretics, periodically driven underground and currently tolerated. Neo‑Paulicans, Gnostics, Muslims, and anyone else who wants religious freedom. They do not riot — they graffiti, they propagandise, and occasionally they assassinate. Mortal enemies of the Whites.
Anarchists and cybernetics enthusiasts; young, poor, heavily augmented, and politically incoherent. They riot spontaneously for reasons no outsider can reconstruct. Their racing tactics are the most innovative in the Hippodrome.
The Blacks (atheists, ridiculed, rarely qualify). The Teals (Venetian money, widely considered traitors). The Browns (Africa's border farmers). The Grays and the Pinks, who are still trying.
The Hippodrome
Two motorcycles of strictly limited displacement, one metal chariot, one hundred laps. The winner is first across the line — or the last chariot standing. Drivers carry blunt spears, long clubs, punching weapons and whatever their augmentations allow, and every weapon drawn costs a thirty‑second pit stop on the following lap.
Riders are not supposed to kill each other. If one happens to die, the crowd does not complain.
The street
The cataphracts police the Old City on horseback and serve as the Emperor's fast reaction force when a colour riot gets out of hand. The Varangian Guard — foreign, expensive, and loyal to whoever holds the purse — has nearly doubled in size under the current reign. The Excubitors, the Emperor's personal bodyguard, are recruited only from Africa.
A short glossary
The slums. Tower blocks, grey markets, and a priest who knows everyone. Symeon lives at the top of one of the towers, which is why they call him the Stylite.
A man who works the seam between the nobility and the street: courier, broker, finder of lost things. Skirts the law without quite breaking it, most days.
A licensed title, and a jealously guarded one: the right to maintain and cobble together cybernetic prosthetics. Demetrios lost his licence and kept the work.
Armoured cavalry of ancient fame, now the police of the Old City. Still on horseback. Still contemptuous of anyone who works for the highborn without being one.
Heretics with a cant of their own, a taste for outlawed sermons on microdisk, and — the reader may notice before the characters do — a serious interest in artificial minds.
The movement that holds computer‑driven depictions of the holy to be a heresy. The current Emperor takes a personal interest. Symeon thinks it is all very silly.
See it
Development art from the series bible: churches, street scenes, cataphracts, heretics, and the icons that glow.