DAIAN DOESN’T LIKE THE SEA. He was born in the Tenth City, about as far inland as a Crachian can be extracted before changing nationalities. He didn’t come to the Capitol until well into manhood. The air that permeates the Bottoms never sat right in his nostrils, and always seems to cause his stomach to perform unpleasant acrobatics. The sea itself looks untrustworthy to Daian’s eye. It’s too vast, too silent, and yet always moving. That perpetual motion disturbs him the most. It’s not something to which he feels safe turning his back.

The Bottoms isn’t composed of the docks exclusively, but they are the center of its microcosmic world. The constant commerce and transport and construction draw those who belong to no Gen and accept no other place in Crachian society, those who choose to live outside the auspices of the state, but can either ill afford to leave the Capitol or refuse to do so. They come to feed off the scraps left by the massive machinery of the shipping trade and hide in the monolithic shadow cast by such towering enterprise.

Daian salutes the Aegins stationed there by grasping the hilt of his dagger in its scabbard with one hand and raising his other. They respond by holding their weapons aloft. Seafront Aegins carry daggers only as last-resort weapons, very few if any of them devoting the time and energy to the discipline of the short blade that city Aegins do. Not confined by the narrow streets of the Capitol, the seafront Aegin is issued a gleaming silver trident with a four-foot haft. They’re useful for crowd control, and as lifelines on the oft occasion a drunkard goes plunging off a dock.

For close-quarters combat, they carry short breaching axes that can also be used as tools to cut through line, mast, or hull in the much more likely event of an emergency onboard one of the ships docked in the bay.

Daian breathes through his mouth in a concerted effort to mitigate the smells carried on the sea air. The colossal trading ships crowding the bay are a city of wood writhing atop the low tide. He watches dozens of vagrants tethered to one another by thick wrist and ankle chains being led away from the docks by fellow Aegins. The triple prongs of their tridents prod the reluctant and the stragglers along.

Daian heard there’d been a recent sweep of the shipbuilding yards. Apparently dozens, if not hundreds of such vagrants had long taken up residence in the excess hulls stored there. He stops to watch the procession of new prisoners, the sight giving him pause. He thinks about those numbers, hundreds of vagrants, and the limited space in the Capitol’s cells.

It didn’t take Daian long to realize that most Aegins are concerned with precisely two mandates from the Spectrum and two mandates only: aesthetics and statistics.