Kraft watched Wadin's face shift through a series of subtle, contradictory expressions: tension at the worsening situation, dutiful grief, thoughts of his own condition, and a touch of unavoidable schadenfreude.
As they drew closer, those expressions flattened and vanished, replaced by suspicion and wariness.
The boat looked as if it had been lying there for a long time, long enough to be consumed by damp, sickening black mold that obscured its original color.
A mooring rope, like a dead snake, tied it to a jutting reef. The knot was nearly worn through, with only a few strands of fiber keeping the abandoned boat from being swept away by the rising and falling current.
It was not a boat of the same design as theirs, nor did it have any flotation barrels. It was just a flat-bottomed boat commonly seen on the Tem River, used for ferrying people or cargo in calm weather. It was cheaply made and easy to capsize.
People from outside the Church had arrived here before them, sometime between a few weeks and two months ago.
There was nothing inside the boat to prove who they were. Only deep, bite-like, tearing gouges in its hull showed what had happened along the way.
The boat's interior had been reinforced with extra planks, but that had not stopped whatever attacked them from ripping away a large section of the gunwale and punching several ragged, jagged holes through the bottom. That might have been why they had scrambled ashore in such a panic.
Those people had survived the attack and made it here.
"Those Heretics." There was no one else it could have been, but Father Green could hardly imagine how they had made it down before the Great Hall collapsed—and brought a boat with them.
"Hopefully, they drowned in