<em>"Trade? Outsiders are trouble, just more words to--"<br/><br/>"I don't trust em! They're with the last lot, hoping we'll fall for the same trick twice--"</em><br/><br/>The muttering from the townsfolk is hard to make out, a curious pidgin of Low Realm and Forest-Tongue--but the intent was clear enough. Though civilised by comparison to the motley group that Mouse leads, they have a hard, wiry look about them, the look of survivors used to guarding something in great demand. And mutterings can be heard from behind her, tension aggravated by fatigue and desperation and giving rise to near-open defiance.<br/><br/><em>"She talks with them? That is not the way of--"<br/><br/>"Silence! She will hear--"</em><br/><br/>The defenders look around, and stand back suddenly. A man approaches down the centre of the gorge, limping. His appearance is halfway between a respectable village headman and a barbarian shaman. What skin could be seen under his simple but well-made clothes was so weathered and wrinkled that his true age was hard to guess, his hair bleached white and his face hidden behind a mask made from a human skull, with the pieces of bone mounted upon a cloth covering. The repulsed reaction of Mouse's followers can be heard as a low hissing--the dead are not something that should be tampered with, and ghosts are things to be placated and then not meddled with. Whoever he is, the townsfolk regard him with both respect and caution.<br/><br/>"My name is Malequs, speaker for the past. Others offered to trade, very recently." he says, addressing Mouse. "But they lied about the payment they wanted....and stole my people."