A Bone-Walker is about the size of a large dog, though it looks bigger: a long, narrow body slung between four tall, stilt-like legs, and a heavy, beaked head on a long neck. Its hide is pale and hard, almost the colour of the bleached bones it feeds on, and plated along the back. The beak is short and immensely strong, with a hooked tip for splitting bone and prising out marrow. It walks with a high, jerky, picking step, and a group of them on a bone field look like more bones that have learned to move. When it feeds it makes a steady crack and scrape, and when threatened it hisses and clacks its beak.

They wander the bone fields and canyons of the Parched, wherever old skeletons and fresh kills are found, alone or in loose groups.

A Bone-Walker goes from carcass to carcass, cracking bones and drawing out the dried marrow, the last moisture and fat the dead hold. It is not a predator and will not attack a living creature for food. But once it has a carcass it will not give it up: it defends its find against anything, beasts many times its size and armed travellers included, and fights to the death rather than retreat.

Its beak cracks bones that a hammer would not, and its hard hide turns most teeth. It can find a carcass from a long way off by smell.

They lay their eggs in the hollow bones of great skeletons, and the young hatch inside and crack their way out. A Bone-Walker that dies is soon picked over by others of its kind.

They clean the plane’s bones and leave them white; the Dust-Eaters follow them to fresh kills. Their danger is only to the hungry traveller who tries to take a carcass from one.

Travellers tell of bone-pickers that will fight a man over a dead beast, and the tale is true. Among the sayings that come back from the Parched is that a Bone-Walker never leaves its dead, said of someone who will not let go.