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place, and Lawrence could not imagine his brother—his lighthearted and smiling brother Ben—getting married in such a temple to gloom and damnation. But was it any more fitting a place for a burial? Lawrence waveredon the edge of not caring and feeling that the murkiness of the church matched his own mood.
    The other anchor to the square was the tavern, and Lawrence knew that it saw a more religious attention from its devoted followers than did the church.
    But he passed both and headed down a side street to a massive wooden structure with the ill-chosen name of Black Ice. The icehouse was a major employer in the town and many of the men of Blackmoor started their working lives there as boys and ended them there, as Ben did now, as bodies laid out on slabs of ice awaiting burial.
    Lawrence nearly gagged at the thought, but he steeled himself. He dismounted and tied his horse to a post. He walked to the big barn doors, which stood slightly ajar. A waft of chilled air brushed his face as he stood there, and he knew that going inside was going to cost him.
    If Ben can endure it, then so can I.
    With that he pushed the doors wider and stepped inside.

     
    T HE ICEHOUSE FELT colder than any place he had ever been. The air was thick and damp and the lanterns did nothing to dispel the oppressive murk. He moved down the main aisle, past empty wooden bins for shaping the ice, past the great saws that cut it into slabs or cubes, past long blocks of ice covered with straw to slow their melting, past side rooms where butchers stored and cut their meats.
    Ben Talbot lay on the last block of ice at the end of the row, deep inside the building by a back wall. Someone had draped him with a sheet and though the color hadfaded to a muddy brown, Lawrence could tell that the stains on the sheet had once been bright red. It hurt him to see his brother laid out in such a place, displayed on ice like a choice cut of beef. Defenseless and vulnerable, without dignity.
    And alone.
    Alone in this cold and terrible place.
    Lawrence reached out an unsteady hand and pulled the sheet down. At first he just uncovered his brother’s face, and for a long moment Lawrence stood there and tried to impose the memory of his brother’s boyhood features over the landscape of this dead man’s face. Ben’s eyes were closed, and though that was a mercy it also removed the element of personality. This was a man he did not know who had been the boy—the
brother
—he had loved.
    Ben’s face was turned away, the exposed cheek smooth, but when Lawrence bent over to examine the landscape of his brother’s features he saw with horror that the opposite cheek had been slashed from temple to jawline. Four long, deep wounds.
    With trembling hands, Lawrence pulled the sheet down to Ben’s waist.
    “Dear God!” The cry was torn from him and he staggered back, hand to his mouth. There did not seem to be enough air as the whole room spun crazily around him. He staggered forward until his thighs bumped against the unyielding ice of the slab. “What . . . what . . .
did this?”
he demanded, but his only answer was his own echo.
    Ben Talbot had been eviscerated by some terrible and savage claw. The flesh of his muscular abdomen had been slashed as if by swords, but the tears were too jagged to have been made by edged steel. These were definitely claw marks, but nothing short of a tiger or a bearcould do such horrible damage. Ben’s skin was bloodless and white and hung like strips of stage canvas, and in the gaps of the wound Lawrence could see striated muscle, yellow globules of subcutaneous fat, coils of purple intestine, and the jagged ends of shattered ribs.
    He sensed movement behind him and turned to see a grim-faced butcher in a stained leather apron standing near. The man knuckled his forehead.
    “You’d be Mr. Lawrence I expect?” he said, his breath steaming in the frigid air. “Mr. Benjamin’s brother?”
    Lawrence nodded, unable to speak.
    The