The High Scars

Overview

The High Scars are the escarpment and pass country of the Windscar Expanse: wind-broken uplands, cliff transitions, exposed shelves, and the few storm-cut gaps through which anyone crosses them alive. Together with the anchored Rimward Basins below, they carry the full regional weight of the Expanse.

This is the travelling half of The Windscar Pacts. Its people are mostly High-Scar Orc kindreds, joined by Troll crossing houses on the worst passes and Ogre burden-camps that come up for heavy work. Both orders reached the far side from the cradle-web by the one crossing of the Glassbelt. Few of them stay anywhere for long. What holds the region together is not a settlement but a promise: that a party taken under escort will be guided honestly, warned in time, and avenged in blood if the road betrays it. Outside that promise are storms that strip a camp in an hour, wild dog packs, raiders who were once escorts themselves, and the unavenged dead standing at their cairns.

Lay of the Land

The High Scars are the northern and eastern half of the Windscar Expanse. They rise in shelves from the Shearline, the escarpment facing south over the Rimward Basins, and beyond them dry country runs on north to the sea cliffs above the Soundchain Roads. West of them lies the Glassbelt; south-east, the escort routes come down towards the Leeward Folds.

The Whetgap cuts the first shelves above the basins, with Gapmouth at its mouth and Slidescar on its worst stretch. Oldcairn lies on a high shelf beyond, five or six weeks from Deepdraw by the ramps and the pass, and two to three months from the Turnwater Quays by the longest escort routes. Their place among the far side's regions is set out in The Lay of the Land.

Land and Hazards

The High Scars rise in steps. Long escarpment faces separate one shelf from the next, and the greatest of them, the Shearline, is the cliff-broken edge where the high country drops towards the basin rims. Between the faces lie bare plateaus of stone and thin grass, scree fans, dry ravines, and a handful of passes cut through the rock by wind and old water. Visibility is enormous on a clear day. A warning fire on one ridge can be read from the next shelf before a runner could cover half the distance.

The wind is the first fact of life. It funnels through the passes hard enough to strip a camp, carries dust off the lower basins in brown walls, and shifts with little warning when the seasons turn. Storms come fast along the faces, with lightning on the high ground and sudden rock-slide below. Water is the second fact: a few seeps, cisterns, and catch-pools along the routes, each one known, named, and argued over.

• exposure on the open shelves when a storm catches a party between shelters
• rockfall, scree slides, and ledges that give way in the passes, especially after hard rain
• beasts: packs of dun dogs that shadow a party for days and take the straggler (an escort child's first warning call is on the line, meaning a pack is following), and scorpions in the shelter walls. Wound flies lay maggots that eat an open wound alive, and in a swarm year locusts strip the shelves and the herds starve
• raiders: struck-name bands who know the routes as well as any escort and fall on parties in the passes, often in the last hour before a shelter, when everyone is looking at its walls
• bad guidance: a warning not given, a delay not declared, or an escort that claimed knowledge it did not have

Ordinary Life

High-Scar life is lived along the routes rather than around fixed towns. Kindreds move between seasonal camps on the sheltered side of ridges, with their herds grazing the thin grass of the shelves until it gives out, then moving on before the ground is spent. Larger gatherings happen at the treaty-grounds and at the passward shelters: stone-walled refuges set at the mouths of passes and the ends of exposed stretches, kept stocked by whoever holds the route.

Most adults have some share in escort work, even those who never captain a party. A child's first lessons are cairns: which stacked stone points the way, which marks a water hold, which records a death. Older children run messages between camps and graduate to warning runs, carrying news of storm, slide, or raiders along the warning ridges faster than any caravan moves. Herd-children learn early to throw stones at the fast spotted wind cats that sprint in for the kids and lambs, and to pull the purple stagger-vetch before the herd finds it.

Peoples and Power

Power in the High Scars belongs to whoever can make passage safe, or make a broken passage cost blood, and it is spread across several hands.

• The escort orders. The High-Scar escort orders are the region's heaviest power: route moots, where elder captains hear the grievances of the bereaved and name the blood-price, cairn-line wardens who keep the markers true, warning runners, escort captains, and the treaty-ground elders who stand by when a party is taken on or handed over.
• The kindreds. Behind every escort stands a kindred, and behind every kindred its remembered tally of crossings held and betrayals answered.
• The Troll crossing houses. On a few passes and landslide routes, Crossing-Oath Houses hold the crossing by oath, decide when it is too dangerous to use, and take their price for keeping it.
• The burden-camps. Ogre camps under the Hearth-Weight Compacts can refuse heavy work that would consume them unfed or unsworn, which in a hard season can stop a route as surely as a slide.

The order is contested from inside. Younger escorts, who spend more of their lives among other peoples than among their own dead, ask why a captain's worth should rest on what their grandparents did on the road. And bands formed around those whose names were struck from honour, and their heirs, live outside the Pacts entirely. They know the routes as well as anyone, guide for whoever will pay, answer to no route moot, and in a lean year raid the parties they were not paid to guide. The escort orders put a price on the worst of their captains, and bounty-takers of the kindreds hunt them across the shelves.

Settlements

The High Scars have no capital and few places that stay put. What stands still is the route: treaty-grounds where parties change hands, passward shelters at the pass mouths, and Troll houses on the worst crossings. The greatest treaty-ground, Oldcairn, is the nearest thing to a centre, since the route moots sit there in the calm months.

• Oldcairn. A broad treaty-ground ledge on a high shelf among the oldest cairns of the chains, whose names no living kindred can read.
• Gapmouth. The passward shelter at the mouth of the Whetgap: stone-walled refuges, store-chambers, and a catch-pool, kept stocked by whoever holds the route.
• Thingrass. A seasonal camp-ring of one High-Scar kindred, about a hundred strong, pitched in hide shelters on the sheltered side of a ridge while its herds graze the thin grass of the shelves.
• Slidescar. The Troll crossing house that keeps the worst stretch of the Whetgap: a family of a dozen settled in rock shelters above the scree, mending what the slides break and taking its price from whoever crosses.

The People

About 48,000 people live in the High Scars, some nineteen in twenty of them High-Scar Orc kindreds. Ogre burden-camps bring a thousand or more for the heavy seasons, Troll crossing houses hold about four hundred, and Giants are rarer than the stories about them.

• Orcs. Route dress is a knee-length felt or hide coat, belted, with hood and face-wrap against the wind, leather leggings, and hair bound long.
• Ogres and Trolls live, die, and are named here as on the cradle side of the Glassbelt: Ogres as in the Headwater Marches and Trolls as in the Briarreach.

Neighbours and Borders

• Downward, the Rimward Basins. Below the Shearline, route country descends into the defended wells and rim strongholds of the Rimward Basins.
• Inland, the Glassbelt. Past the inland edge, the dry uplands give out into the salt flats and glassed ground of The Glassbelt Interior.
• Towards the Folds. Escort routes run out of the Expanse towards the sheltered terraces of The Leeward Folds.
• Coastward. The longest escort routes end at the Tidelace Coasts, where Gnome harbours answer arrival at outer roadsteads and keep inner entry for themselves, under the terms first made in The Tidelace-Windscar Approaches (c. 148,000-c. 138,000 BR).

Roads, Rivers, and Trade

The High Scars have no rivers worth the name, only seasonal torrents that cut the ravines deeper and leave them dry. Roads are what matter, and a High-Scar road is not a built surface but a line of knowledge: cairn chains across the shelves, passward shelters at either end of the exposed stretches, warning ridges where fires and runners carry news, and treaty-ground ledges where parties change hands.

The main crossing of the high country is the Whetgap, a narrow storm-cut pass where the wind is strongest and the scree least stable. Most traffic between the basin rims and the routes outward passes through it or waits for it to open. A Troll crossing house keeps its worst stretch, and Ogre camps are hired there most years to clear what the windy season brings down.

Historical Memory

The High Scars remember themselves as the reason the Pacts exist. Long before The Founding of the Windscar Pacts (c. 180,000-c. 150,000 BR), distance here killed whoever tried to cross it alone, and the treaty-grounds, escort oaths, and the blood owed for a broken passage that became the Pacts grew from the need to cross together. Later the route side hardened into the escort orders themselves, in The High-Scar Escort Orders (c. 121,000-c. 112,000 BR), as the basin side hardened into The Rimward Well-Keepers.

Belief

The High Scars belong to the two Orc gods of the Windscar. Ushkar the Ancestor-Warden keeps the names of those who held passage and strikes the names of those who broke it; kindreds recite their dead at the treaty-grounds, and the oldest cairns, their names worn past reading, are called his tears. Rakhal the Storm-Caller is the wind itself, breaking whatever has gone stale. Camps light fires on the high ground as the windy season rises, and lone lightning-struck thorns along the escarpment routes are taken as his marks. His following is growing among those who think the escort orders have started honouring names over roads. Beneath both gods, escort custom is its own alignment custom of held passage and answered betrayal.

Tensions

• Redirection by another name. A sworn escort reaches the Oath Cistern late in a dry year and is offered redirection under guard to another well, across the Whetgap in the opening days of the windy season.
• The struck guide. A party refused by the escort orders hires a guide from a struck-name band, and arrives safely by a route no kindred will vouch for.
• Who feeds the camp. An Ogre burden-camp will not clear the Whetgap until it is fed.
• A Waker on the Whetgap. A Cairn-Waker has risen across the Whetgap approach, and the escort it was failed by belongs to the strongest kindred on the route, which will not stand before the moot.
• The door found again. A young escort says she has found the giant's door in the cliff a second time and is selling the way to it.
• Old cairns, unreadable names. Some of the oldest cairns along the chains bear names no living kindred can read, and nobody now knows whose crossings they record.