Chapter Forty
CHAPTER FORTY
Alaric halted on the ridgeline, eyes tracing the plains and valleys to the shimmering horizon. They’d been chasing the Huns for a week through a blasted land. Empty villages dotted the plains below, like corpses on an abandoned battlefield. Dead crops rattled in their fields and vultures watched from the trees.
“Vultures are a sign of death to come,” Riga said, reining his horse in next to him. “The question is, whose death?”
“We cannot go much further. This feels like a trap.”
Riga glanced at him, unsmiling. “The gods help you though, if you don’t deliver.”
Alaric knew. At his back, Wallia’s men spread out across the slope below. He had promised them plunder and victory; if he delivered, the warriors would see those spoils flow from his hands. He didn’t like to think what would happen if he failed. At least Julia was safe with Thorismund and Horsa.
Just then, something caught Alaric’s eye. Dust, thick and white, churned up from horses’ hooves. He recognized that dust cloud.
He raised his voice and called his men to him.
* * *
Alaric galloped into the valley with his army at his back. The Huns had sighted them; they were running for the high ground. Riga’s mercenaries would flank them from the west, and together they would grind the enemy to meat. And then he could go back to Noricum, to Julia, with Wallia’s men united under him . The city would be just a little safer for her.
A prickle started in the center of Alaric’s shoulder blades. Then he felt it—the change in the air. The shift in the earth; drumming up from his horse’s hooves.
Movement in the trees that was not the wind.
Ambush. He tried to signal the men. But his army was starving and dust-blind, the enemy drawing them on like a mirage in the desert. Then Wallia emerged from the cloud, raising his spear as if to signal the men. Alaric glanced up, and there—up on the ridgeline—he saw Riga and his men sweeping down the opposite ridgeline. To the east.
It took him a moment to realize what he was seeing. They were riding in the wrong direction. Riga had betrayed him.
It was the last thought he had before a heavy spear haft sent him crashing off his horse.
* * *
An old war rose up in his sight, one long over.
Your enemy is down there. The ghost of Eugenius pointed with a rusty gladius down into the canyon at Frigidus. Alaric tightened his grip on the reins and twenty thousand voices rose up at his back. Then he lunged forward into the canyon’s gullet.
His spear was death spinning in his hands, cutting through breathing bodies. Arrows rained down without mercy. Stilicho never warned him that the enemy was in the walls.
Down where the canyon narrowed to a cut, there was a black-clad man standing still against the chaos, a wicked spear dripping blood onto the sand. It was Calthrax, the throat-cut demon who rode in Alaric’s wake. It was Eugenius, the bright red line bisecting his head from his body. It was the bear, great teeth bared. Alaric stepped over the bodies of living and dead to meet his enemy.
He fought as his father taught him long ago, his weapon a black slash in the filmy curtain between life and death. There was too much blood in the earth. Alaric’s feet slipped in it. He tightened his grip on the spear and drove it into his enemy’s heart.
The spear is in your heart, brother. Alaric looked down and saw the spear lodged in his own chest. The bear flashed bloody teeth. It is a good death. A right death.
He knew he was supposed to accept his death. But Julia stood before him now, her red-gold hair spilling over her breasts, tears glinting in her eyes like diamonds. He could not die here.
Alaric ripped his own blood-soaked spear out of his chest. The bear rose snarling out of every shadow.
* * *
Death was not as he expected.
Alaric lay on his back on the battlefield, on earth sodden with blood. A sharp pain stabbed him in the ribs.
You still live, brother. I should know.
Alaric turned. The voice came from the corpse that lay next to him. It was Calthrax. Blood leaking out of the slash Alaric had put in his throat.
What a battle, eh? Almost like those of old that we fought together. What I wouldn’t kill to live those days again.
Thorismund would know some spell to send the dead away. Alaric didn’t know any goddamn spells. So he used plain words. “Go away, Calthrax. Go back to wherever the dead go.”
Battlefields are where the dead go, brother. You should know. You’re halfway one of us. The corpse’s terrible smile broadened. But not all the way. Not yet. Now get up.
Now the corpse was a gray-bearded warrior, eyes already milking over, Alaric’s own axe rising from his forehead. Alaric rose to his feet and jerked his axe out of the man’s skull, then looked across the charnel floor of the valley. Corpses littered the battlefield, already bloating in the hot sun. Vultures picked at the dead, their great black wings spread over their meals.
A shape was coming toward him through the carnage, leading an exhausted horse.
Another ghost. He had killed Ataulf, had he not? Killed him in his heart, at least.
“You look like shit,” Ataulf said, halting before him. The horse he led was Hannibal, his black coat sweat-soaked and throwing off the sun. “I think you know this old soldier. I found him skulking on the edges of the battlefield, harrying deserters.”
Alaric felt a hitch of relief in his chest. Hannibal. He braced his hand on Hannibal’s shoulder and the horse reached around to run his teeth across his back. “I sent you away for a reason, Ataulf.”
“It figures I would rescue you from being hacked to death by your own army, only to have you tell me to make myself scarce. You’re welcome, you tyrant.”
Alaric wiped sweat and blood off his brow with a forearm. It was too damn hot to think straight. His head was still ringing. “I think Riga ambushed me.”
“You think Riga ambushed you?” Ataulf was looking at him in bewildered disgust. “Riga saved your miserable life. Ask him yourself.”
Ataulf pointed with his sword across the battlefield. Riga and Hengist were riding toward him, their horses picking their way among the corpses.
* * *
With Riga’s help, the story began to piece together. Riga had seen the ambush through the trees when he’d swung west with his men. He’d planned to flank the ambushers, but there had been too many. Luckily Ataulf had been pillaging in the next valley.
“There were Goths amidst the Huns,” Hengist told him. “I think it was Sarus, working with Wallia to lead us into this trap.”
Alaric rubbed the bruise along his jaw. “Wallia was the one who knocked me off my horse.” Suddenly the true size of what had happened crashed in on him. Wallia had lured him out of the city and worked with the rebels and Huns to assassinate him. None would question it if he died in battle. And if Wallia still had allies in Noricum—
Ataulf was thinking the same thought. “Who did you say you left in charge in Noricum?”
Julia. Stark fear rose in his chest.
“I will handle it myself,” Alaric said to Ataulf. “Your help is not needed. What you did to Julia is not forgiven.”
“I didn’t offer,” Ataulf snapped. “But if you love your wife, you’ll let me ride to Noricum at your back. You’re out of men, and Wallia must have an ally behind those walls. You need me.”
Alaric cursed. Ataulf was right.
* * *
It took four days of hard riding to get back to Noricum, fear for Julia crowding Alaric’s head. He worried for Horsa too, and Thorismund. But it was Julia’s fate that had him waking up in cold sweats.
When the walls of Noricum rose on the horizon, Alaric felt an immediate sense of foreboding. The city was too silent. A wind snapped the flags to tautness and ripped at the tattered clothes of the dead on the wall. Julia was not among those bodies. Thank the gods.
They halted at the ridgeline above the valley at dusk, and Hengist pointed across the plain. A figure was moving toward them at a panicked gallop. Riga raised his bow and nocked an arrow to it. Sighted down the line.
“Lower your weapon, Riga,” Alaric said, nudging Hannibal into a ground-eating canter toward the other rider.
Alaric slid off Hannibal just as the rider near fell off his own horse and into Alaric’s arms. Horsa’s eyes were wild, rimmed with fear as he said the words Alaric dreaded most in the world. “It’s the Romans. They’ve taken the city.”
* * *
They approached from the east, where trees gave cover and there were holes in the walls large enough to drive a chariot through. But whoever had invaded was not posting guards. Their entrance was not challenged.
Inside, the city held a haunted quiet. Alaric led his men through narrow, sloping streets toward the citadel. Halfway up, they crossed a large square. The alleyways leading out of it had been blocked by street rubble. Alaric didn’t like those blocked alleyways. It had the feeling of a trap. But to go around would mean losing hours.
There was an old Roman bathhouse that ran the length of the square—a way to cross without being seen. The door was rotted off its hinges. Inside it smelled of mildew and death. With his men at his back, Alaric moved through shafts of filthy light, over layers of dust that covered bright mosaics. Archways yawned into blackness and empty pools opened at their feet.
And then he heard a cough. And then a low, guttural groan.
They found Thorismund lying on a couch beside a drained pool. There were black stains on the cushions that stank of blood. Alaric knelt and grasped Thorismund’s hand.
“The Romans hold the citadel,” Thorismund whispered. A long, livid cut ran across his torso. The old one opened anew. “I couldn’t stop it.”
Fear gripped Alaric’s heart. “Is Julia alive?”
“Last I saw—” he gave a great hacking cough “—she was fleeing toward the citadel with the Roman woman. I do not know whether she lives now.”
Alaric stilled. “What Roman woman?”
“She was trying to secure stone to repair the aqueduct. She knew the Roman woman from Ravenna. A friend, she said.”
Ataulf spoke behind him. Cold and factual. “She let Romans in, under the pretext of repairing the aqueduct. She did this.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Thorismund let out a low growl. “She never betrayed you, Alaric.”
Noises on the roof. Hobnailed boots on the tile.
“Leave me here,” Thorismund grated. “I’ll only slow you down.”
But already Alaric was helping Thorismund to his feet. “Not a chance.” Not a chance Julia had betrayed him either. Even so—doubt nagged at his mind.
There would be time later to determine where Julia’s allegiances lay.
* * *
The citadel loomed high and forbidding, atop a rock that rose up from the center of town. But that rock was not as solid as it looked. Alaric knew from Julia’s maps that it was riddled with caves, ancient and damp, used as sepulchers and sewers.
That night with Julia was burned into his mind. Sitting on the floor with her, the maps spread between them and her red hair gleaming in the lamplight as she explained to him the inner workings of the aqueduct. He could not tear his eyes away.
But he’d also studied the maps. They hadn’t only detailed the aqueduct—they’d also shown a network of branching passageways beneath the citadel. He’d committed them to memory, knowing he might need them someday. He’d never thought it would be this soon.
The map, unfortunately, failed to tell him which of the passages were flooded.
They slipped into the tunnels under cover of dark, Alaric and the twins and some ten of his own. The first three channels had been flooded, the last only half-flooded. This one had been a sepulcher once. There were rock-cut tombs lining the walls, their contents shrouded in darkness; Alaric shuddered to think what was rotting below the waterline.
A muffled cry from behind him. Horsa. “Something brushed my ankle.”
“It’s probably a corpse,” Hengist answered. “It wants to devour you and throw out the husk to preserve its youth.”
“Quiet, both of you,” Alaric growled.
“Are you lost, Alaric?” came Hengist’s too-casual question.
Alaric gritted his teeth. He didn’t want to admit it.
This passage should connect to another, branching off to the west. From there, they would reach a vertical shaft that connected to the citadel courtyard. He could only hope there would be some way to climb it. Then all they had to do was kill the guards and open the gate to let Riga and Ataulf in with the rest of the men. Easy.
“Fuck,” Horsa whispered. “I think something bit me.”
“Coward,” Hengist muttered. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a little fish.”
“It was a big fish,” Horsa said. “I felt it brush my—”
“It was probably a minnow.” Hengist laughed, and some of the men started laughing too, and heckling Horsa, as if they were fucking invincible. As if he was fucking invincible and could keep them from any harm they brought on themselves with their noise.
The passage ended at a fork, neither pointing in the right direction.
“North,” said Horsa immediately.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. But it’s dry up there. No fish.”
It was as good a reason as any. “North, then,” Alaric said, and pushed forward, feeling his way in the dark.
* * *
Four days after Lucretia took the citadel, she summoned Julia in the middle of the night.
Lucretia was sitting in the atrium of Julia’s former quarters, wearing the same linen robe Julia had worn on her first night. Her dark hair tumbled down her back. For an instant Julia had a disorienting vision—Lucretia stepping into her life, into Alaric’s bed like some life-stealing ghost. Herself banished.
“Julia. Darling. Come in. Have some wine.”
Wordlessly, Julia went to the table and poured. She handed Lucretia a cup and looked at her expectantly. “You don’t mind, do you? Out of an abundance of caution.”
“If I wanted you dead, I hardly have to go to the effort of poisoning you.” Julia held quiet and Lucretia gave an elaborate sigh and took a sip. “Happy?”
“Delighted,” Julia said flatly. “I suppose there is a reason you summoned me here in the middle of the night?”
“I haven’t been able to sleep properly since wolves ripped my son’s throat out before my eyes. If I cannot sleep, neither can you.” Lucretia regarded her contemplatively. “Do you remember what the problem is with love, Julia?”
The answer came readily to her tongue. It had been her sacrament. The one holy rule of Ravenna. “Love ruins you.”
“Precisely. When you love someone like I loved Cornelius, losing them ruins you. I was ruined. The only thing to do is destroy that which destroyed the thing you love.” Lucretia took a sip of her wine. “Imagine my surprise when I found you had landed on your feet. Not fifty miles from my own home, the beloved wife and queen of another man you’d beguiled into marrying you, after doing the same to my son and leaving him dead in the dust.”
A flash of rage crossed her face like a storm.
Julia drew a breath. Her own grief over Cornelius, her own self-hatred and blame, her own nightmares in the dark, rose up and choked her throat.
Lucretia would not care. She had suffered more. Julia would not insult her by appealing to her sympathy.
“What do you plan to do with me, then? Considering my husband will arrive soon,” Julia said mildly, affecting an attitude of bored indifference that would have been perfectly at home in Ravenna. “I don’t wish to scare you, Lucretia, but he is as vicious as the rumors say. Have you seen the bodies on the wall? Those were people my husband didn’t like.” There was a smell of smoke in the air. Battle. “He is here now, is he not?” She carefully hid the overwhelming surge of hope, said it as if it were all the same if he was or was not.
“Yes. In fact I believe he will join us any minute,” Lucretia said. “The maps of the citadel tunnels you left strewn about this house were very helpful in determining where to place our defenses. And when my husband arrives, with reinforcements, I will send you both to Honorius.”
“Really,” Julia said incuriously. “I thought you’d have something more interesting in mind than running back to Honorius like a dog to its master. I suppose not all of us can be credited with imagination.”
“It would seem your brother’s power base is stronger than I thought. The future is with him.” A heavy knock sounded at the door. Lucretia smiled. “Ah. There he is now.”
Two centurions entered, a man’s limp body braced between them, bronze-blond hair falling forward. It took Julia a shocked moment to realize it was Alaric.
“Did you enjoy watching Cornelius get devoured?” Lucretia asked, tapping her manicured nails lightly against the table. “It would amuse me to see you watch someone you love die screaming, as I did.”
One of the centurions gripped Alaric’s hair with a mailed fist and hauled his head up. His face was streaked with blood; but he was alive. His blue eyes blazed with rage.
He was alive. Julia nearly fainted in relief.
Lucretia’s eyes were on her, missing nothing. Julia knew this game. She had played it as a child, when her father had a favorite tutor whipped in punishment for her transgressions. She had done it as an adult too, to protect those who depended on her.
She understood with riveting clarity that if she betrayed any feeling for Alaric, Lucretia would torture him to death in front of her. She must not fail him.
She examined her nails. Every inch the bored, dissolute princess. “I’m afraid you misconstrue me, Lucretia. I do not love him.”
Lucretia laughed. “That is a lie, my dear. I could see it in the way your face heated and your voice trembled with awe when you spoke of him the day I came. Like a lovestruck, green girl.” She smirked. “You said you would die for him.”
Julia shrugged indifferently. “Then my act was good enough to fool even you. Did you see how close his men were listening? There has never been a moment when I was not surveilled.” She took a languid sip of her wine. “Don’t be naive, Lucretia. I used him. That’s all. I seduced him and made him love me. I had to.”
“Well then, my dear. You won’t mind if I rearrange his features, will you?” Lucretia raised a finger. “Verinus, bring the hot metal. I think we’ll start with his eyes.” The centurion reached for a long piece of metal that had been warming in a brazier, and brought it up to Alaric’s face. He didn’t even flinch at the heat.
Julia tensed. “Wait.”
“Is that sentiment I see, my dear?” Lucretia’s razor-sharp tone raised every hair on Julia’s arms. “Surely not.”
“ No. Don’t be ridiculous.” Julia rolled her eyes. “If you want to gain my brother’s favor, you won’t send him back blinded. Find him a doctor, give him food and water, and bring him back to health. My brother will hardly want him ruined when he could do the ruining himself.”
“A compelling argument,” Lucretia murmured. “But I was so looking forward to seeing your husband tortured. I hate to be robbed of my simple pleasures.”
“Domina?” The centurion held up the hot poker. “I’d love to blind this bastard.”
Alaric stared past the poker as if it didn’t exist. His eyes were on her.
Julia drummed her fingers on the arm of her couch as if bored. Alaric had adopted just this affectation at that banquet in Ravenna, all that time ago. Surely he would recognize it. “Let me do it. I know exactly how far to go without incurring my brother’s displeasure. This brute would go too far.”
“Hmm. I had never imagined you shared your brother’s proclivities .” Lucretia raised a brow. “Well? Go on.”
Julia rose to her feet and approached her husband. The seething rage in his blue eyes nearly scorched her to the floor. He knows it’s an act , she thought wildly. Surely he does.
But she wasn’t so sure.
She halted in front of him and held his burning gaze. “Do you trust me?” she asked him quietly. “Now you must.”
Then she took the iron and laid it against his chest.
Alaric did not scream; he did not even flinch.
“Oh, darling,” Lucretia spoke from behind her. “That was pathetic. Let me show you how.” She grasped Julia’s hand and drove the iron hard into Alaric’s chest.
The sizzle of burning flesh filled the room and nausea clawed up her throat. Alaric’s jaw clenched; his body went rigid with pain. It was long minutes before she finally let go.
“There,” she said. “A fitting punishment for a man who ravaged all of Italy, is it not?” Alaric’s gaze was only on Julia, with so much blazing hatred that she took a step back. Lucretia flicked her fingers at the guards. “This game has ceased to be amusing,” she murmured. “Send him away.”
* * *
Alaric fainted on the way to the prisons beneath the citadel. He came to himself lying on his back on hard stone. Every inch of him hurt.
The Roman soldiers had been waiting when they’d emerged from the tunnels. It was almost as if they’d been warned.
Alaric’s had been vastly outnumbered, corralled in a narrow space; he’d lost sight of the twins. He’d taken a vicious beating. Blood still covered his face from a cut to the scalp.
He thought of Julia with her maps. She knew exactly where those tunnels were too. She could have warned Lucretia’s men.
The hole in his chest hurt the most. It screamed from even the barest contact with his shredded shirt. He shut his eyes and it didn’t make a damn difference in the blackness.
Julia. With his eyes closed he could still see her, lounging on that satin couch, every inch the Roman princess he’d first met with her red-gold curls spilling down her back, that cruel little smile lifting her red lips. What she’d said had been seared into his mind as if with hot metal.
I used him. That’s all. I seduced him and made him love me. I had to.
Fuck. He’d been right about her in the beginning. After everything they’d been through, after the war he had fought with his own heart. In truth, she was only another child of Theodosius. Ataulf had been right. She’d made him mistrust and drive away his best friend and chieftains. She’d made him risk his kingship. Fuck.
The darkness pushed in on him as if it had its own weight. Somewhere water dripped and rodents scurried in secret places. The rats would come for him soon, if he continued to give a credible impression of a corpse.
She enspelled you , Calthrax whispered. So quiet and sibilant it could have been the rats. She cast a spell, just as Ataulf said.
“Superstitious horseshit.” But the rage—the hurt —that rose up in him this time created a new pain that rivaled the burn in his chest. It drove him to try to stand just to escape it.
The moment he did, the black rushed in on him and pain filled his world.
* * *
The next time Alaric opened his eyes, there was light in the room. Smell of burning lamp oil. He forced himself to sit up. The effort didn’t make him faint this time.
Between the bars of his cell, he could see two guards sitting at a table with a single dim lamp between them, staring at a latrones board and muttering to each other in broken Dacian-inflected Latin. One man barrel-chested and potbellied like an aging gladiator; the other wiry and dark with a skinny neck. A pile of coin gleamed between them.
Beyond, Horsa and Hengist stood watching the game from behind the bars of the other cell. Alaric nearly fainted in relief. They lived. There was a purpling bruise extending down Hengist’s neck, and he didn’t like how Horsa was holding his arm. But they lived.
Somewhere, something was burning. Ataulf had likely set fire to the houses outside the citadel. If he could get himself and the twins out of this place, perhaps the original plan could still work.
But first he had unfinished business with his wife .
Alaric leaned against the bars, watching the guards in their oily circle of light. They drank from a clay jug of wine—rotgut stuff like they had in the army, barely more than vinegar. He could smell it. They were bored and drunk. That could easily be channeled into belligerence.
Alaric raised his eyes to the twins and laid a finger to his throat, drawing it across. The boys did not have to be told twice.
“Hey. Ugly,” Hengist whispered, in the same bastard Latin the guards used. Both of the guards’ heads snapped up. “He’s cheating.”
The wiry one narrowed his eyes to slits. “You cheating, Raskus?”
“No. Not him.” Horsa gave him a jagged smile. “You, my friend.”
The aging gladiator, Raskus, glanced up. “If you’re cheating me, Dagomar, I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Dagomar said. “They’re just trying to rile you up.”
“We’re not,” Hengist said, yawning widely. “I saw him slip a piece in his sleeve. We used to cheat like that when we besieged Verona.”
“How do you think he won all that gold?” Horsa added. “He’s not the better player.”
Carefully, so as not to attract notice, Alaric ripped a piece of cloth off his tunic and wrapped one end around his fist.
“Fuck you,” spat Dagomar. “I never cheated.”
“Let me see your sleeve, Dag.”
“You calling me a liar?”
In an instant they were shoving each other across the table, the jug of wine shattering on the floor. The big one hit the bars of Alaric’s cell with a thud . Alaric was ready. He looped the length of cloth around the man’s neck and jerked back.
The sound of gruesome choking echoed off the close walls.
Dagomar hurled himself at his friend, trying to pull him out of Alaric’s grip. He only succeeded in making the strangulation go quicker. Raskus flailed, knocking over a chair, then kicking Dagomar in the stomach. The man went staggering, his back hitting the bars on the opposite side. Horsa caught him, choking him out, using the weight of his own forearm. He slumped lifeless to the ground and Hengist had his hands through the bars, rummaging in Dagomar’s pocket for the key.
“The other one must have it,” Hengist muttered. “Hurry and kill him, will you?”
Easier said than done. Dagomar had a skinny neck, but Raskus’s was meaty and full of muscle. Alaric got one hand to the side of the man’s head—Raskus tried to bite him, almost took a chunk out of his forearm—and it was all he could do to get the leverage to snap the man’s neck. It was not a pretty death. When he was finally slumped against the bars with his head twisted nearly all the way around, Alaric turned the corpse over to rifle through his clothes.
Raskus did not have the keys either. He drove a fist into the stone wall. Fuck.
“You’ll break your hand,” Hengist said mildly.
Horsa gripped the bars and rattled them savagely, cursing. “There must be a way out. There must be.”
“Keep calm, Horsa.”
“He says keep calm as if he didn’t just break his own fist.”
Alaric gritted his teeth. “Get me that dagger off the Dacian’s belt.” Maybe he could dig one of these bars out of its socket.
The door swung open and a cloaked figure stepped into the room. It was Bromios, Ataulf’s shifty-eyed lover. He stopped on the threshold and cast an eye over the two corpses in the wrecked room, a disreputable grin on his lips.
“What a mess you three made. I suppose you were looking for this?” He held up his hand, a ring of keys swinging from his fingers. “You wouldn’t believe what I had to do to get it.”