The Warbots Karamazov
an excerpt

As I slept I dreamt of flying, not flying as in youthful fantasies, or even on board the airships of my secret order, but borne upwards into the skies on the oily wings of Lucifer, clasped wriggling and writhing to his bosom. As he soared, he showed me all the kingdoms of the world. And he told me:

"I would offer these to you, but they are already yours. You claimed them for God and Queen, but God has moved beyond you. Brother, you should know this better than most. You know what tenuous fealty you bear the Queen, you know what treachery it is that bound your brethren to her. You will not find God within your Empire, Martin, but he may yet dwell within the walls of your Abbey. But even that world rapidly becomes too small for Him."

So saying, he flew on with me, embracing me with his dark sinewy arms. And below us, the Wall passed us by. We flew over the iron mines of Wales, great smoking crater and foundries, and endless queues of tiny men burdened and pressed down to the earth.

We flew.

We flew over the Channel. We flew across Gibraltar, across its two great fortresses who stared balefully at each other with centuries of muted aggression. The Barbary Empire of the Moors whose advances we had resisted for hundreds of years, keeping their corsairs out of England. Yet the South paid a heavy toll, for without the rich plunder of civilization, the wastelands were ravaged all the more.

So we flew down through Africa, down cross kingdoms whose names changed daily, through fiefs whose borders existed solely in arguments, across great mountains and blackest forests. It was a land far beyond the reach of the Empire, even had the Moors left anything there for the Queen after nearly a millennia of domination. There remained nothing save a cauldron of incivility, a great burning wasteland of savages.

We flew east, then, and north, up across the Horn, up across Arabia. There we spiraled languidly around shining capitals, full of towers and minarets, their walls inlaid with mosaics and precious gems. Here lay the empire who had crushed back the Crusaders and claimed the Holy Lands irrevocably to themselves. And as we passed overhead, I heard voices ringing from rooftops, from temples.

And Lucifer mocked me, saying to me: "Brother, has the pride of your Queen driven God this far away. Your Christ brought Him to civilization, and now you have relegated him back to the wilderness."

And despite my terror, I felt the truth of it.

"How they have fallen," he continued, "and how you will fall."

And as I plummeted towards the pointed spires, down towards the faithful, I awoke to find myself back in the wine cellar, back in the Roman fort-- one captor to another.