"How did you know?"
Benny turned to look at him in surprise. Before anyone could answer, he mused aloud, "True, the Church must know. But why did it take so long—so very long—for someone to come?"
Feld was at a loss for words. He couldn't exactly say that the Church had turned a deaf ear for twenty years, and that the two hapless fools had come here through a combination of coincidence and their own foolishness.
If he'd had any choice, he should have broken all four of their legs when he was driving them back then. They could have stayed at the estate to recover, taking turns writing reports every day.
Instead, they were now forced to risk venturing into a fog beyond their understanding.
It wasn't only the fog in his mind that troubled him. The mist before them also seemed to be growing thicker, rather than dispersing with the sunrise as his intuition suggested it should.
Mountain moisture was unlike riverside mist. Against a shadowy, impure backdrop tinted gray-green by the trees, it settled from unseen heights and flowed through the valley, channeled by its natural confines and the erratic winds.
Especially when he looked upward, he could clearly see the gray veils churning in a motion that seemed slow but was actually swift. Like old bruises that never faded, or murky drool hanging from the clouds, they streamed down in rivulets across some indistinct barrier separating them from the sky.
"How long have we been walking?"
A night spent traveling had dulled his sense of time, but after struggling to detour around the ruins of the former village, hunger finally made him notice its passage.
"Close to noon, I'd say. We're slower than usual." Lucian, walking nearby, took off a glove and felt the icy droplets