‘Our forebears were a tribal people possessed of a primitive Lore that was known to all. We are no longer that same people. We know only that they sang eldritch songs of power,’ Birin told her. ‘However, no one alive today now remembers what those songs were.’
They set out at as great a pace as they could muster, Birin assuming, perhaps irrationally, that the presence of the Necropheids was a local phenomena, that simply by removing themselves, or by putting distance between themselves and the creatures, that the crisis would be over. The going was slow, however; their best pace was only a mile every hour, if that.
The terrain, though not difficult, was not conducive to speed where the heavily laden wagons were concerned. The trail they made for themselves wended its way through an endlessly convoluted land of snow-covered hillocks topped with clumps of bare trees or tall copsewood. Twice they were brought to a near-halt by bands of thick bracken of an evergreen sort, waist-high, broad-leafed and dense. There was no choice but to plough straight through these, as they blocked all passage from north to south from one side of the valley to the other. Midway was a further obstacle, a sharp embankment dropping to a lower level, followed by what appeared to be a shallow lake, or deep marsh, covered by only a thin skin of ice.