hat concealing his face, stepped up behind them. They came inside with a torch.
Zerco, his discovery inevitable, stepped out. Even as he displayed the medallion, the dwarf could see the third man’s eyes widening.
The stranger spoke in Hunnish. “Little mouse!”
It was Skilla.
“That man is a Hun!” Zerco cried in surprise.
The guard captain shook his head. “We warned you not to come here.”
Skilla spoke to the Alans in Latin, his accent thick. “I know this dwarf. He’s an assassin, kidnapper, and thief.”
“I’m an aide to Aetius and Anianus! Harm me at your peril!”
“If allowed to speak to your bishop,” Skilla warned, “he will mislead him.”
“He’s not going to speak to anyone.” Blades were drawn.
“Listen to me! This is a trick to betray your city—”
A sword swung with a whistle, narrowly missing. Zerco hurled his hammer at Skilla’s head, but the Hun knocked it away, scoffing at the attempt. The dwarf dropped and tried to scuttle, but blades clanged against the stone floor, blocking his way. So he somersaulted backward instead, knocking over a rack of spears and shields to slow his tormentors. The men laughed. This was play!
“The Huns are going to enslave you!” the dwarf warned from the darkness.
A spear sailed at the sound of his voice and nearly pinioned him. “Come out, little mouse,” Skilla called in Hunnish. “The cat is here to eat you.”
He needed a mouse hole. There was no back door and no window. A drain? He hadn’t noticed one. He looked for a spot darker than the darkness, the boots of his assailants treading heavily on the stone as they moved to corner him.
And there, in the corner where wall and ceiling met . . .
The men charged, and the dwarf leaped. He sprang past a sword thrust and clutched at the mail of the guard who had challenged him, temporarily blinding the man with a poke that elicited a howl. Then he clambered like a squirrel to the man’s head and leaped, half landing in a tight cavity. His fingers scrabbled for a hold.
“Get him! Get him! I can’t see!”
A hand slithered on his ankle. Zerco kicked, connecting with something hard, and pulled himself upward with all his might, wriggling up a passageway as narrow as a pipe.
“Boost me up!” someone cried.
He could hear an arm thrashing behind him. “He’s like a damned rabbit. It’s too small! There’s no way I can follow.”
“What is that hole?” Skilla asked.
“Who knows? Probably a vent, to give air.”
“Can he get out the other way?”
“There are grates on the outside to keep out animals. He can’t go anywhere, but we can’t get him, either.”
“Maybe if we boost up a dog . . .”
“Why bother,” Skilla said. “Aren’t men working to reinforce the walls? Get some stones and a hod of mortar. We’ll seal him in and have no corpse to explain.”
Even as they worked, Skilla felt cursed by the dwarf. The little man was grotesque and scuttled like a spider, and he seemed tied to every moment of the Hun’s torment by Jonas and Ilana. The witches had told him forest legends of squat and scabrous gnomes from the German woods who plagued ordinary men with magic and tricks. The annoying Zerco was one of these, Skilla believed, and sealing him in a stone tomb would be a gift to the world.
The warrior watched impatiently as the guards clumsily bricked. How Skilla hated it down here! No Hun liked crowded, dark, or confined spaces; and these underground passageways that the Romans had built were all three. He was proud of having been assigned the mission of conspiring with Sangibanus—it was a mark of his uncle’s growing trust in him, despite his setbacks—and he knew success would eventually bring him overdue recognition, and Ilana.
But the past week in Aurelia was almost more than he could bear. It was never quiet in the city. His senses were battered with noise, color, crowds, and ceaseless clanging. How he longed for the countryside! But soon Sangibanus would betray his own capital and Aurelia would fall. Soon the Huns would be masters of everything, and the clever men who made life complicated would be no more.
The king of the Alans dared not simply surrender his city, Skilla knew. His own warlords, who distrusted their cousin Huns as much as they distrusted Romans, might turn on him.
Sangibanus could not convince them of the West’s weakness without seeming a coward. Nor could he simply organize a party of traitors to overwhelm the sentries at his own gate. If too cowardly to fight Attila, he was also too cowardly to murder his own soldiers, because the chance of betrayal and civil war was too high. So instead Skilla had offered a different way. With Roman armor and a persuasive Aurelian officer, a party of Huns could seize the gate with a minimum of bloodshed, holding it open just long enough for other Huns to gallop through. With that, the battle would be over before it began, and no one—including King Sangibanus—
need die.
Now they had to act more quickly than planned. If Zerco had found this hidden armory, who else might know? Aurelia must fall before the dwarf was missed.
XXIV
I
THE GATE OF AURELIA
There are few things more difficult, Zerco supposed, than listening to men brick up your tomb. He tried to laugh at his predicament, just as he had tried to laugh at his entire bizarre life. How he’d wanted to be an equal in the councils of the big people! His humor was a mask for his bitterness about his own ugliness, of course—just as it covered up his astonished wonder that he could marry a woman as fine as Julia or have a friend as promising as Jonas. Now he would pay for pride and ambition! Sealed in a little catacomb without the mercy of oblivion. Should he back out before they finished and hope for a quick death instead of torture? Or stay out of reach and suffocate instead? For a little man who depended on agility and wit, the latter seemed a particularly pathetic way to die. Yet life had taught the dwarf to keep hoping. He was a freak who advised generals and consulted with bishops. So perhaps it was not time to wiggle backward to certain death but to squirm forward. Even as the final stone was wedged into place, Zerco was climbing the steep incline of his tunnel to find where it led.
What followed, his mind would long shy from remembering. He would not recall if he had been suspended in darkness for hours or days, and if the overwhelming feeling had been of cramped heat or numbing cold. He’d simply remember wedging himself ahead. A ridge of stone could seem as insurmountable as a mountain, and he’d peck at it with his fingers, loosening key bits and letting them rattle down behind him. Then he’d shimmy, expelling all air to shrink and surge forward some impossibly small amount.
He’d jam, gasp, his middle squeezed by what felt like the entire weight of the Earth, ears hammering, expel air again, wriggle forward, breathe, gasp against the pain, expel . . .
again and again and again until finally his hips would be past the obstacle and he would lie panting in a tube no roomier than a cocoon, his heartbeat the only sound, his sweat the only lubricant. Somewhere, fresh air was keeping him alive. As his clothes disintegrated he left the pieces behind except for strips with which to wrap his hands. His blood made him slippery; and as it leaked, he shrank.
So he did. He passed an even smaller hole, its rank smell tying it to an old Roman sewer, slimy effluent dripping down like a baptism from Hell. Praise God! It made him slicker! The worst came when he spied a glimmer of light but only beyond a narrowing of the cavity that at first seemed too small even for him.
