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Standing in the prow of the feast canoe, Anandamar rubbed his thumb across the marbled, ovoid disc nestled in his palm. Behind him, the warriors of his tribe, the Makaed, dug their oars into the waves.
Acid spray bit into the exposed skin of Anandamar's forearms and cheeks, where the coating of bonetree talc had rubbed away, but his skin was so scarred after years of raiding that he barely felt it.
It was the month of Rust, nights of raiding and feasts, when the three moons were all in the sky and the sea was the colour of corroded iron. The ragged cliffs above stood scarlet against the orange sky. Only the brightest stars sprinkled the night with blue-white light.
Brightest of all was the Stranger, which had first appeared above the islands of the Sent in the months of hungry nights before Rust. It charted a course in front of the faces of the moons, its path at odds with the turning of the rest of the sky.
Anandamar glanced down and to his left, at his sister-son, Damargael, out with a feasting party for the first time. The boy's eyes were puffy behind his glass goggles as he bent to his work, his jaw clenched tight under the wet cloth tied over his mouth and nose.
His arms and face, unprotected by talc, were flecked with red welts. nandamar smiled behind his own damp mask, his belly warming with pride, in spite of his worry.
Six more feast canoes followed the vessel that carried their chief, the warriors driving their boats along as close to the surf as they dared, parallel to the beach and the cliffs. Each canoe held over a hundred men, hooded, masked and goggled, their skins pale with talc.
Soon, they would come to the cleft in the etched rock face where the goodwater of the tribe of Chirgurtha flowed into the sea. Beside it, he knew, steps zigzagged up the cliff to the watchtower above.
Again, Anandamar rubbed his thumb over the disc he held. It was smooth like a riverbed pebble, but waxier in texture than stone. On one side was a depression that fitted the pad of a man's thumb. When grasped, it warmed in a way that no rock would.
Anandamar remembered his grandmother's stories of time beyond her memory, of the lore, of Sender artefacts that had heated, or made light, or changed shape when touched, in the days when the Long Silence was still young. By the time of Anandamar's youth, all such objects had become inert.
That this was a Sender artefact was plain. But the Makaed, greatest of all the tribes of the Sent, were the keepers of Sender lore and guardians of all Sender artefacts, and this had not come from Makaed.
Lumin had brought it under a flag of truce. They had taken it from a dead Chirgurtha, killed during a feasting raid the Lumin had beaten back from their fort in the early nights of Rust.
