CHAPTER 20Varl’s thoughts were like bubbles rising in a sparkling wine, streaming up to burst and form small craters ringed with tiny fountains; each burst was a question.
How had Ovidio died? What could take a man and smear him out in a thin, even layer on the curved surface of a ship? What could spread a man like warm butter beneath a knife—and all in an instant of time?
Varl turned, restless, in the darkened privacy of his cabin. He had finally yielded to sleep too long denied, but his slumber was broken by a stream of mental images.
What had killed Ovidio? Yegorovich? Cole and the others who had vanished? What had driven Rachel insane?
He turned again and saw monsters sitting, watching, waiting to reach out and take the Odile and crush it and squeeze it into a battered container fi
