Following Ludo's lead, they cut around the side of the ravine and followed its edge up the hillside. It was hard going, clambering over rock and through spiny furze. Light-footed as always, Ludo found himself pulling ahead while the others laboured behind. Alert to the possibility of greenskin sentries lurking among the bushes, he checked his pace. They had climbed quite a way from the mouth of the gully, and with the warm spring sunshine beating down on his back, even he was sweating a little.

It was a smell other than sweat that first alerted him that they might have found their quarry - for those who had helped rescue Tatiana from the caves under the crags, a smell that was all too familiar. Ripe and musty, like mildew and manure, now it wafted on the open air. Following his nose, Ludo crept up to the edge and peeked over.

Below him, the ravine widened out into a bowl-shaped hollow, where it looked like in rainier times a waterfall had plunged from the higher ground above. Around its steep, rocky sides, ramshackle shelters had been rigged from scavenged timber and mouldy, patchwork canvas. There were goblins down there, lurking underneath their tatty awnings. Exactly how many was hard to say - fewer than Ludo remembered in the great cavern beneath the hills, but scores at least. Many of them seemed to be sleeping, but that still left plenty who were awake and watchful, chattering among themselves or sharpening crooked knives. All of them huddled close to the walls of the hollow, keeping out of the sunlight.

The greatest concentration of them was under a rocky overhang at the back, behind where the falls would once have run. The greenskins had screened it with a curtain of ragged black cloth, stitched with the image of a crescent moon grinning through a mouth full of jagged teeth. Two goblins stood guard outside this entrance with hoods pulled down over their faces, hunched behind wooden shields almost as big as they were.

In front of them, in the middle of the hollow, a dead tree stood in the centre of an island of loose rock. The goblins had been hard at work decorating it. Rags of leather hung from its two longest branches gave the impression of outstretched wings, while the wooden effigy of a snaggle-toothed wyvern’s head had been nailed to the end of its topmost branch. Tied to the base of its trunk were two human shapes, so wound round with rope that it was hard to make out any distinguishing features. A lean brown cow also stood there, its neck leashed to the tree and its rear legs hobbled together. A few gnawed bones lay scattered around it - Ludo thought he made out the skull of a goat.

There was no sign of any ‘wild man’, unless one of the figures lashed to the tree was him. Searching the scene for any other clue it might give, Ludo thought he saw one of the hooded guards before the crescent moon curtain raise its head, and quickly ducked back down out of sight.

OOC:
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Here’s a sketch to help make the scene clear:



You can assume everyone’s got up close enough to get a first look at what’s going on, but there’s a lot of goblins down there - if you want to try to gather more information, I’m going to assume that your heads are poking up above the edge, and there’s some chance of being seen.