The Windscar Pacts

Overview

The Windscar Pacts are the oldest major named civilization of the Orcs, and the first major inland civilization of Caeldon's far side, rising late in the consolidation of the riverine Bankright Circles of the Kavari. They hold The Windscar Expanse as a treaty-linked confederation of basin-edge strongholds, guarded caravan corridors, upland meeting grounds, and hard passage custom. No settlement stands over the others. What holds them together is the escort: an armed company that can bring a caravan across country that kills the careless, and a name that dies if it fails.

The clans' lineages, honour, and dead are kept under Ushkar the Ancestor-Warden, the Orc god of remembered honour. The Expanse's scouring wind is the god Rakhal the Storm-Caller, who breaks whatever has gone stale.

How It Holds Together

The Pacts hold open country, not walled ground. Power belongs to whoever can bring people and goods alive across the shelves, keep a treaty-ground without treachery, and answer a raid, a betrayal, or a broken escort with spears.

They are hard, but not lawless. Basin-edge strongholds, storm-tested camps, wandering kindreds, and escort companies each know their place, and they are joined by known meeting grounds, sworn water and pasture, and an old custom of answering blood that keeps feuds from becoming wars. There is no Orc empire. There is only a people who cross country no one else can, and make the crossing pay.

The Pact world has two sides, and its custom keeps them distinct:

• Reserve-right belongs to the anchored side, strongest in The Rimward Basins: well-keepers, cistern guardians, reserve moots, and answer bearers who hold water and give a declared reply to arriving parties.
• Treaty-right belongs to the exposed side, strongest in The High Scars: route moots, cairn-line wardens, warning runners, escort captains, and the elders who keep the treaty-grounds.

Daily Life

Pact life has two countries. Camps, herds, cairns, and the wind-year belong to the escarpments, in the High Scars' Ordinary Life; strongholds, cisterns, and the dry-season gathering belong to the rims, in the Rimward Basins' Ordinary Life. What is particular to the Pacts is what happens when kindreds meet, and what happens when one has wronged another.

Medieval Role

The Pacts hold the far side's widest passage order. Their reach runs to the Halfling folds and the Gnome coast, and they answer to both.

• A stronghold may give an escorted party delayed reception on declared conditions, and if the conditions are never met the captain may raise it at a route moot, or take the water by force and answer for it at the next treaty-ground.
• An escort captain may refuse a lucrative party whose route would cross a kindred with an undeclared quarrel against her own.
• A Halfling fold market may give an Orc escort exchange and rest but not shelter, and an escort that presses for more is held to have broken passage.
• A Gnome harbour may admit an Orc party to its outer shore and not its inner quays, and an escort that knows the difference is trusted with the next crossing.
• An escort captain may be hired by a Halfling fold to hunt down a struck band that raided its cistern, and take her pay in water.
• A kindred may pay a shard-hunter in animals for a torque brought out from the edge of the Hanging Vale, and then spend a whole treaty-ground arguing whether the dead who wore it are better honoured by its return or shamed by the theft.
• A struck band may guide a desperate party across a shelf no Pact escort will cross that season, and either bring it through or leave it there.

At the Reciting of the Names the escorts who held a crossing are recited as long as their kindred lasts, and a young escort setting out touches the cairn of the nearest of them for the road. Among them are the captain who took a whole caravan down the Shearline in a dust storm by the feel of the rope, the warning runner who ran three shelves with a broken foot to light a cairn-fire before a flood came down a wash, and the escort who stood alone in a pass against a struck band while her charges got away, whose name the band itself is said to honour. Children on the rims play her stand with a stick for a spear and a ring of thorns for the band, and when lightning strikes a lone thorn on the shelves, kindreds say Rakhal has marked a place where someone once held.

History

Orcs crossed the harsh lands long before any pact. Routes and treaty-grounds grew thick along their crossings, and only afterwards were the Pacts founded as a named civilization, in The Founding of the Windscar Pacts (c. 180,000-c. 150,000 BR). Their founding proved that the far side could produce durable civilizational form outside the Elderweald-Ironspine-Confluence cradle-web.

Towards the Halfling folds. In The Leeward-Windscar Terms (c. 160,000-c. 145,000 BR), Orc escort right first had to answer to Halfling bounded reception and fold-capacity custom. That line hardened into open accusation in The Measure Cistern Crisis (c. 147,000-c. 143,000 BR). Windscar escorts called reserve custom polished false narrowing; Halfling elders called escort right polished extraction.

Tensions

• Lineage or deed. Younger escorts, who spend more of their lives among other peoples than among their own dead, ask why a captain should be trusted for what their grandparents did on the road.
• The struck and their heirs. Bands formed around those whose names Ushkar struck live outside Pact custom, guide for whoever pays, raid the escort roads, and answer to no route moot.
• What kneels at the valley head. A shard-hunter came back to the Lastwater Wells swearing she had seen the shape at the Hanging Vale's head, and that it is a door.
• The answer that will not close. A kindred declares an answer for a broken escort.