Remi said, “Will it give his name?”

“Almost certainly not, unless it’s disguised in some way. He was cunning, clever. He would not want a Roman to find his tomb. But I think he wanted it to be found some day.”

“Certainly he gave us all the clues,” said Remi.

“He made us work backward, from his most recent treasure to his very first. I believe he wanted a Hun to find the treasures and then use the wealth to do something in the world—but first to conquer it. Perhaps he wanted a descendant to find it. Apparently none of his three sons was up to the task of ruling the world and he undoubtedly knew it.”

“Now that we’re here, I feel as though I must have missed something along the way, some way of distinguishing his tombstone from the others,” Remi said.

“Finding the tomb is part of his test too. We’ll use what we’ve got—date and age—and see what else there is. The catacomb was used between the second and the seventh centuries. His will be somewhere in the earlier ones. And I’m guessing that there will be something that outsiders wouldn’t recognize—maybe a linguistic signal, something that’s not in Latin.”

“I hope he didn’t make it too hard for us non-Huns.”

“I have faith that he didn’t. Think about what you and Sam have just been through. He’s been teaching you about himself. He’s been forcing you to go and stand in each of the places where his life was changed. He’s taken you from the final days, when he was at the height of his power, marrying the beautiful Gothic princess Ildico in his stronghold on the Hungarian Plain surrounded by his hundreds of thousands of fanatical followers, all the way back to the very first moment of his career. Now we know that the start wasn’t a triumph. It was the moment when an orphaned twelve-year-old stood in his father’s grave, about to be sent away as a hostage. And what he did was vow to conquer Rome and be buried here.”

“But he didn’t conquer Rome.”

“He reached the point where it was in his power to do that but chose instead to preserve his overpowering army for another day.”

“And he died before he could come back.”