The Rimward Basins

Overview

The Rimward Basins are the anchored half of The Windscar Expanse: a country of closed interior basins whose rims carry the strongholds, defended wells, and rock-cut cisterns that let Orc life stay in one place long enough to matter. The High Scars above them are held by moving escorts. The Basins are held by keeping. Water, stores, and refuge are counted here, guarded here, and fought over here: by escorts who think a well is being hoarded, by struck-name raiders who think it is thinly held, and by whatever comes in off the desert with nothing left to lose.

Rimward kindreds are one of the living Orc identities inside The Windscar Pacts, and their country gives the Pacts their fixed weight: reserve nodes, meeting points, and refuges without which a passage confederacy would have roads but nowhere to stand. The inland rim looks out over The Glassbelt Interior, where the wells give out. Dry, hard, and defended, the Basins are nothing like the soft river-fed basins of the Confluence Basins.

Lay of the Land

The Rimward Basins are the lower, south-western half of the Windscar Expanse: a chain of closed basins along the desert's edge. The inland rim faces west over the Glassbelt, with the Lastwater Wells on its outermost spurs. The Shearline rises to the north and east, and the ramps climb it to the High Scars. Eastwards the rim tracks give way to the Lee Road, which runs over the Lee Wall to the Leeward Folds in seven or eight weeks under escort. South of the basins nothing is mapped.

Deepdraw stands on a rim spur near the middle of the chain, three or four weeks from the Lastwater Wells and five or six weeks from Oldcairn. The Long Pan, with Saltcut on its edge, fills a neighbouring basin, and the Oath Cistern stands at the foot of the busiest ramp. At the southern end of the inland rim, a day's walk from the southernmost of the Lastwater Wells, the Hanging Vale opens west onto the Glassbelt. The Lay of the Land gives the far side as a whole.

Land and Hazards

Each basin is a shallow bowl with no outlet. Its floor is salt crust, dust flat, or cracked clay that may hold a skin of brackish water for a few weeks after the rare storms before it dries back to white. The rim is the living part: terraced spurs and rock shelves where runoff can be caught, springs and deep wells reached, and stone cut and stacked into walls. Low dividing ridges and dry washes separate one basin from the next, and long ramps climb from the rims towards the escarpments of the High Scars.

The broadest floor, the Long Pan, floods ankle-deep in a good year and grows a short-lived green fringe. Every herd within reach is driven down to graze it before it browns, and the pan's edge is the one place in the Basins where many kindreds camp side by side without a stronghold between them.

• Dry cycles. One bad year is survivable.
• Wind. Dust storms strip the floors, bury catchment channels, and close the ramps for days at the turn of the windy season.
• The floors themselves. Salt crust lies over mud that takes a laden animal to the belly, the pans store heat and give it back at night, and washes run as sudden floods off the rim after a storm nobody in the basin saw.
• Fouled water. An unworked well silts up; a cistern left too long goes bad.
• Things that bite. Sand-coloured horned vipers lie buried at the edge of the shade, scorpions live in every wall, and hairy sun spiders chase a sleeper's shadow. Wound flies turn a scratch into a death, a cornered dust runner kicks hard enough to break bone, and pan hyenas take the sick, the weak, and anyone who sleeps alone.
• The Hanging Vale. A dry side-valley still stands in the crystal left by the Krystallis Incursion (c. 352,000-c. 349,000 BR), and its edge facets a hand laid on it long or a sleeper lying against it.
• People. Raiders who know which reserves are thinly guarded and strike in the last dry weeks, coming up the washes by night under the wind's noise, parties claiming an escort they do not have, and on the inland rim, whoever has come in off the Glassbelt with nothing left.

Ordinary Life

Rimward life breathes in and out with the water. In the dry months households and herds draw in to the rims and crowd around the strongholds; after the storms they spread out again across the outer slopes and basin floors, and each stronghold shrinks to its keeping garrison. A stronghold is a walled spur above a water source: dry-stone walls, a cistern cut into the rock below, stone-lined channels leading runoff into it, store-chambers dug back into the rim, and a watch platform that sees the ramps and the pan, where a horn can call the whole camp to the walls. Seasonal camps pitch in the same rings around it year after year, and a family's place in those rings shows its rank, and is fought over when the rank changes.

Peoples and Power

Power in the Basins belongs to whoever holds the water, and whoever holds a water source answers for it. The Rimward kindreds have no capital and no basin king. Their offices are the ones that hardened in The Rimward Well-Keepers: well-keepers and cistern guardians who hold each source, reserve moots, where custodians from several strongholds meet to check one another's counts and the stronghold with the most spears has the last word, and answer bearers who face arriving parties and give the stronghold's declared reply. A custodian's word is weighed against the remembered honesty of the line behind it, and a line that once lied about water carries that lie for generations, and sometimes pays for it in blood when the lie is found out.

Settlements

The Rimward kindreds have no capital. The reserve moots are as near as they come to a centre, and the largest of them meets at Deepdraw, where custodians from several strongholds can meet. The Oath Cistern at the foot of the busiest ramp is a stronghold too, and its quarrels are the Basins' best known.

• Deepdraw. A stronghold on a rim spur above the deepest well of its basin: dry-stone walls, a rock-cut cistern below, stone-lined channels, store-chambers dug back into the rim, and a watch platform over the ramps and the pan.
• Saltcut. A small stronghold on the edge of the Long Pan, home to salt cutters who work the crust in the cooler months and to the well-keepers of its one shallow well.
• Shortgreen. The camping ground on the Long Pan's green fringe after a good flood, the one place in the Basins where many kindreds pitch side by side without a stronghold between them.
• The Lastwater Wells. The chain of defended wells on the outermost rim spurs, each a small walled post with its well, a cistern, and a handful of custodians and their kin.

The People

About 80,000 people live in the Rimward Basins, nearly all of them Orcs of the Rimward kindreds; in the dry months half the basin's people may camp in the rings around one stronghold. A few dozen Ogre and Troll crossers, kindred circuits, and desert arrivals are at the wells in any season.

• Orcs. Rimward dress is felt and hide: a long belted coat, leggings, and a headcloth wound against dust, worn the same by herders and custodians.

Neighbours and Borders

The Basins end wherever the strongholds stop holding the water.

• Upslope: the High Scars. The ramps climb out of the basins into escarpment country where escort and treaty-ground govern instead.
• Inland: the Glassbelt Interior. The inland rim is the edge of the whole Windscar.
• Towards the folds: the Leeward Folds. The escorted road towards the sheltered terraces of The Leeward Folds leaves from the Basins.
• Coastward. The Basins have no coast.

Roads, Rivers, and Trade

There are no rivers. Water moves by well, channel, and cistern, and roads run from one water source to the next. A route is only as open as the last well on it.

• The ramps climb the Shearline, the great escarpment face, to the High Scars.
• The rim tracks link strongholds around each basin and across the dividing ridges, carrying herds, stores, and custodians on their way to reserve moots.
• The Lee Road is the escorted route towards the Leeward fold markets.
• The Lastwater Wells are where Glassbelt crossings begin and end. Parties going out water there for the last time; parties coming in reach them first, often in poor shape.

Salt cut from the pans, herd animals, hides, and escort service go out. Grain, dried fruit, and stored goods come back from the Folds, along with whatever coastward trade has passed through other hands. Salvage and travellers come in from the desert edge. Escorts decide who travels, but custodians decide where they can stop, and in this country that means custodians decide whether a road is usable at all. A stronghold cannot close a road with a wall. It can narrow one by declaring reserve, which is why the three answers matter more here than anywhere else in the Pacts, and why salt-trains are what struck bands wait for between the wells.

Historical Memory

The Basins remember in counts: which stronghold gave honest numbers in the bad years, which one hid behind reserve-right, which party drank past its declared share. The chain runs from The Founding of the Windscar Pacts (c. 180,000-c. 150,000 BR), when rim strongholds stopped being only local lifelines, through the outward-facing Leeward terms and the Measure Cistern Crisis, to the Passage War and then the Well-Keepers (c. 124,000-c. 116,000 BR), when keeping the water became the Basins' defining burden.

The Basins are not on the chain of Water and Who Keeps It, which follows rivers and coasts, but they ask its question in dry form: who may decide about water? Their routes answer Roads and Crossings the same way: whoever keeps the water on a road keeps the road. Both threads are in The Threads of Caeldon History.

Belief

Belief here is kept by clans, not by any priesthood. Ushkar keeps the names. At dry-season gatherings custodian lines recite the ancestors who kept honest counts, and in Rimward memory a struck name is as likely to belong to a custodian who lied about water as to an escort who broke passage.

Rakhal grows strongest where the Windscar settles, and nowhere in it is more settled than the Basins. Dust storms off the pans are his, First Gale fires burn on the rim heights, and the tale of the Still Well is told against the strongholds by people who think a reserve has been kept past its purpose. Beyond the inland rim lie the Glassbelt's dead salt pans, all that is left of the sea whose people worshipped Mereth the Salt-Witch, the faded god of preservation and Rakhal's opposite in principle. His followers point at them when they want to show a custodian where keeping ends.

Tensions

• The sealed reserves. Some strongholds keep cisterns closed under old reserve-right whose original reason no living custodian can give.
• Desert arrivals. The three answers are owed to sworn escorted parties.
• A well held for ransom. The struck band that took a Lastwater well last season sends word that it will give the well back if the reserve moot restores its captain's name.
• The mirror. On the Lee Road, Rimward escorts accuse the folds of exactly the narrowing that High-Scar escorts accuse Rimward strongholds of.