He says little to the other three Aegins waiting with him. Daian often finds he has little to say to most of his fellows in the Capitol. They talk about their daggers and how many arrests they’ve made that week and share crude, often violent jokes about the Undeclared and offer little else conversationally. Daian doesn’t share their enthusiasm for any of those topics.

“They’re in there,” Kamala announces quietly, returning from across the narrow street and what appears to be a disused storefront. “I can hear the chanting through the boards over the windows.”

“What’s the point of all that, anyway?” another Aegin asks, his disgust obvious. “Why risk staring down a knife or facing the cells just to offer lip service to some made-up monster in the stars?”

“Made-up god,” Daian corrects him.

“Same thing.”

“If you’re going to ask questions, a more fitting one would probably be why we’re made to waste our time stopping them.”

“We’re not here to ask questions,” Kamala hisses at both of them. “We’re here to follow orders. It’s an unlawful gathering and they’re observing a forbidden ritual. That’s it. Now let’s go.”

“I’ll watch the front,” Daian offers.

“You do that,” Kamala says disinterestedly as she crosses the narrow street once more.

The rest of the Aegins follow her.

Daian watches them go with a sigh, flipping his coin anew. Worshipping the God Stars was outlawed long before he was born, during the Renewal; “Reason shall take the place of religion” was one of the rallying cries of the upheaval. When he was a boy, Daian’s father told him that at first the God Star priests and priestesses of the time supported the Renewal. When the common people of that age overthrew the great houses and ended the rule of noble bloodlines, the temple hierarchs assumed they would be spared. Daian imagined then what it must have been like when the people finished with the nobility and came for the temples, tearing them down stone by stone and defrocking every plump, pompous old man wearing a medallion and a fancy hat.

As a boy, thinking about the looks on their faces made him giggle.

Yet hundreds of years after the Renewal, after the abolition of nobility and religion and their false authority, there are still people in Crache willing to become the Protectorate Ministry’s scapegoats in order to whisper the names of the God Stars in dark rooms. To Daian’s mind, rooting them out was no fit duty for an Aegin. He wished the people would either let the ancient symbols go, or the powers behind Crache would allow them their silly gatherings; Daian has no preference one way or the other.