A single Bleed-Beetle is about the size of a thumb, broad and flat, with a hard, ridged shell the colour of dried blood that turns bright red when the beetle has fed and swells. Its head carries a pair of long, hooked, hollow mandibles, and its six legs end in hooks that grip skin and cloth. It flies on short, stiff wings with a dry rattle. A swarm sounds like hail on a roof and is seen first as a low, dark smudge moving fast over the sand. They smell of copper.

They live in great numbers across the Parched, nesting in cracks in the mud flats and in the shade of old bones, and swarming out towards any moisture they sense.

A swarm finds water, sweat, and blood by smell, from far off, and comes straight to it. Each beetle latches on with its hooked legs, drives in its mandibles, and drinks until it is full, then drops off to rest and digest. They do not choose between a seep and a body. A swarm settled on a living creature does not leave until it has drunk all it can.

Their mandibles pierce hide and leather, and their hooked legs hold so well that a beetle torn off leaves its head behind. A swarm can drain a large beast in an afternoon.

A swarm lays its eggs in any moisture it finds, a carcass, a seep, a drained body, and the young hatch within days and feed where they were laid. A beetle lives one season of feeding and dies dry.

A fed beetle crushed in a cloth gives back a few drops of water, and the Dust-Eaters eat them whole. Their danger is the swarm: a traveller caught in the open by one may be drained, and a camp’s water stores are lost to them first.

Travellers say a Bleed-Beetle swarm can be turned with smoke and fire, and that spilt water draws them off a fleeing man; the second is true and costs the water.

Delvers into the Parched tell of a companion cut in a fall who bled into the sand and was under a swarm before anyone could reach him; they bind every wound tight and fast for that reason.