A bad place but outside it would be worse. There the only hope of survival was to find others, make a crude shelter and spend the night huddled together for mutual warmth. A gamble few could win.
Dumarest picked his way through the somnolent bodies and found himself a space. He settled down, fumbling, lifting the knife from his boot and lying with it in his right hand; both hand and blade masked by his cloak. The floor was hard, the smells stronger in the lower air, but the place was warm from the heat of massed bodies and he had known worse.
He relaxed, ignoring the taste of the swill he'd eaten to maintain his pretense, ignoring, too, the odors and susurration around him. Things easy to forget after a time of relative comfort. Beside him a man groaned, turned, one arm moving, the hand falling within inches of Dumarest's face. A gnarled hand, the nails cracked, grimed, the knuckles raw and swollen. A finger was missing, another black from frostbite. As he watched, lice crawled among the thick hairs of the back and wrist.
From somewhere to one side a man screamed.
It was a short, sharp, sound muffled and followed by a blow. Another cursed. Anger at broken rest and a dream which had turned into a nightmare. Dumarest moved a little, closing his eyes, the cloak wrapped tight around his body.
Resting he thought of Glaire Hashein.
She had been demanding in her passion; memories and wine inducing a feral desire. His room had become the cabin in which once they had traveled. His bed the stage on which she had enacted a familiar scene. A woman protesting her love, making plans, extracting promises. Demanding more than he was willing to give and offering more than she was able. A game in which he had participated, remembering how wine affected her, how she had talked in her sleep.
Yet, when she had sunken into satiated slumber she had said nothing of value.
Dumarest saw her face as he slipped into a doze. Pleasant features which could be the mask of danger. Had their meeting been truly coincidental? Was she being used without her knowledge?
And what of Carl Indart?
A hard man, ruthless, one with the sadistic streak forming the nature of most who hunted for sport. One who had attached himself to the woman for reasons Dumarest could guess. If the man was hunting him what better way to get close?
He stirred, the prickle of danger warning him as it had so often before. The woman, the hunter, Celto Loffredo whom he had come to find. That man could hold the answer to the question which dominated his life, but had apparently vanished from the face of creation.
Dumarest sighed, sinking deeper into his doze, a montage of faces flickering like the glows of a stroboscope as sleep engulfed him. Men he had known, women he had loved and lost, those who had hated him, those he had been forced to kill.
Fragments of childhood and a life in which the shelter he now occupied would have been the epitome of luxury.
Images which shattered as he woke to the sting of a knife at his throat.
The smells had grown thicker, the mumble of sound new a susurration like the wash of restless waves on a distant shore. The illumination was too weak to throw strong shadows but Dumarest had chosen to rest beneath a light, and on the sleeping body beside him something threw a patch of darkness.
A man, kneeling at his back, stooped, the knife in his hand resting on the hood of the cloak. A slender blade which had thrust through the material to touch the flesh just below the ear. A thief's trick; should he wake and pose a threat the knife would drive home bringing silence and death at the same moment.
"Hurry!" The voice was a whisper. "Get on with it!"
An accomplice; one who would search while the other stood guard. Dumarest lay still as the cloak was moved away from the lower part of his body. Fingers probed at his legs, his boots, the lower edge of his tunic. Places were money could be hidden. He sighed as they reached a pocket.
"Jud?"
"Keep looking."
The man with the knife was a thief not a murderer, reluctant to strike without need. Dumarest built on that advantage. As the fingers delved into a pocket, he grunted, twisted a little, hunched his shoulder, shifting his arm beneath the cloak. Movements which trapped the searching fingers and caused the man to lift the knife from its place. It returned at once to rest lower, the point hard against the collar of Dumarest's tunic.
It thrust as he reared upright, the blade slicing through the plastic to slip harmlessly from the metal mesh buried beneath. Before the man could strike again Dumarest had moved his own knife, the steel shimmering as it swept up and back in a vicious slash, dulling as the edge bit deep.
"God!"
The accomplice cringed as blood fountained from a severed throat, a ruby flood which fell like rain, dying as Dumarest turned, knife stabbing, the point reaching the heart. Blood dripped from the steel as it swung toward the other man. Dumarest recognized the man just as the blade took his life.
"Scum." Sagoo Moyna looked down at the man Dumarest had rescued from the storm. "He sold you out. That's the thanks you get for saving his life."
"The other one?"
"Jud Amnytor. I've had trouble with him before. Most don't complain when they've been robbed. Too scared to, I guess. Well, to hell with them." His foot spurned the dead. "How do you want to handle this?"
"Quietly."
"That's what I figured. I should report it to the guards but they must be busy and who wants to buy trouble? What's it worth for you to stay out of it?" He blinked at Dumarest's answer. "That all?"
"Report it and the guards will ask questions. One might be how Amnytor managed to operate so long. Another might be why no one's complained. They might think you and he were working together." Dumarest met the other's eyes. "I might even begin to think you set me up."
"No!" Sagoo glanced at the dead. "It wasn't like that."
"Then we have a deal?" Dumarest added, as he looked at his cloak now thick with drying blood, "Call it the price of a change."
It was dawn when he left the shelter, the windswept streets empty, bleak. Mounds of frozen snow had piled in corners and hung thick from the eaves. Brilliant white which hid the dirt and stains of poverty, the bodies, the debris of the day. Like a cleansing tide the wind swept clean the place men had made their own.
As he neared his hotel he heard a man call and slowed to a halt as Arken ran to join him.
"I'm glad you're early." Arken gasped, beating his hands as he fought for breath. "This damned cold tears at the lungs. I tried to wait for you in the hotel but they wouldn't let me in."
"News?"
He gave it in a small cafe sitting at a table over a mug of steaming tisane. A place catering to those who had finished their term of duty or were about to start work.
"I didn't find the man you want but I met someone who sold me something he owned. A book. I paid fifty for it."
The price Dumarest had paid to dispose of two bodies but, if it was what he hoped, the book was worth a hundred times as much. He took it from Arken's hand. A small, stained volume the covers a dull, mottled green. The pages were brown with age, thick with faded writing. Beneath the cover, printed on an attached insert, he saw the lines and curves of a neat calligraphy.
"Celto Loffredo," said Arken. "That's a bookplate. He put it in to prove the book was his."
Or someone had done it to make that exact point. Arken? It was possible, his time had run out and it was his last hope of earning a reward. Or it could be genuine. Coincidences happened and it would be wrong to be over-suspicious.
Dumarest said, "Is this all? Was there anything else? Clothing," he explained. "Jewelry; rings, bracelets, medallions." Personal items on which figures could have been stamped. Garments which could hold secrets within their seams. "No?"