God of War

SIXTEEN

HANDS BLOODIED AND ACHING, Kratos finally reached the top of the Titan’s mountainous side. For three long days he had climbed-and for the whole of the most recent day he had no longer been scaling Cronos’s hide but instead chipping his way up the mountain chained to Cronos’s back. He had lashed himself to the Titan’s side and slept fitfully several times, but on the long, long rock climb he had pushed upward without true rest. Worse was the lack of food and water as he worked ever higher on the vast Titan. When he had begun, Kratos thought the Titan moved slowly, but the higher he climbed on the side, the more he realized that Cronos sped along. Even though he crawled on hands and knees, each motion was so huge that the wind of his passage had very nearly stripped Kratos from his side more than once.

Kratos’s blasts on the horn had summoned from the depths of the Desert of Lost Souls this great mountain of a Titan, his immortal face worn by time and sand into smooth curves of eternal sadness.

A mountain nearly as tall again rested on the mighty Cronos’s back. At its uppermost lip, Kratos crawled up and over, to find himself face-to-face with an enormous vulture, who was happily ripping an eye from the corpse of a dead soldier.

Kratos frowned. What was that soldier doing here?

Kratos stood to get an idea of the landscape. The mountain’s height would have let him see leagues away, if not for the permanent swirl of sandstorm in the Desert of Lost Souls. But he was more interested in what lay near at hand.

Not far away rose huge but plain sandstone blocks and a crude bronze-and-wooden gate at the front of the magnificent temple. The walls could be solid gold and the plaza paved with diamonds for all Kratos cared. Kratos was indifferent to wealth. He would secure what the temple had been constructed to defend and be on his way.

Kratos reacted instinctively when a harpy described a long, sweeping arc through the skies overhead. He drew the Blades of Chaos and set himself to fight-but the winged creature completed its curve toward the temple.

He jogged forward.

Kratos watched warily as harpies flocked around the Temple of Pandora like bats around a bell tower. Below them, on some sort of broad stone deck, an immense bonfire burned, and the smoke that twisted upward from it was greasy and black. A shift in the wind brought it to Kratos’s nose, and he knew the smell.

The fuel for this fire was human corpses.

Scaling the last few feet proved too much for him. He had to spend considerable time searching before he found some stone blocks that could be fashioned into a crude stair. After scrambling up to a level place, Kratos discovered that what burned here was not a funeral pyre but instead was contained within a huge fire bowl of bronze and stone, whose rim was twice Kratos’s height.

As Kratos approached, the harsh screech of a harpy drew his eyes skyward, in time to see the hideous she-creature open her talons and let drop another corpse-another soldier, it seemed. Bronze armor glinted briefly in the afternoon sun, then clashed like cymbals when its bearer hit the bowl.

“That’ll be you one day. And sooner rather than later would be my bet.”

Kratos spun and the blades found his hands. Limping toward him, using a long staff as a crutch, came some sort of undead too decrepit to even wield a sword or scythe. Its head was mostly exposed skull, one arm ended in a splintery stub of bone, and its right leg was gone below the knee. The one side of its rib cage that was exposed to Kratos’s sight did seem to house internal organs-leathery lungs and a black heart, which pulsed as slowly as the creature stepped. The staff on which it supported itself was fire-blackened and charred at one end.

Kratos scowled at him. He didn’t know how to deal with an undead that wasn’t trying to kill him, let alone one that could actually speak. “What are you?”

“Once I was a soldier. Now…” It jerked its head toward the fire bowl. “I look after this.”

From above came fierce flapping as a harpy circled and released another body to impact in the huge bowl.

The eye within the skull socket seemed to flicker like the flames in the bowl above. “Everybody around here ends up in the fire. Except for me.”

“Everybody?” Kratos asked with a frown. “There are others?”

“Still alive? Probably not. But you never know.”

“I have come a considerable distance-”

“And you’re no closer to your goal. Not really. Zeus hid Pandora’s Box in this wretched temple so no mortal could ever claim its power. And yet, year after year, I open the gate for more and more seekers-and shove more and more bodies into the fire.”

With another screech, a new harpy appeared. The winged monster dropped a fresh-looking body that missed the center of the bowl, ending up draped over the rim. Rather than descend to rectify its mistake, it merely shrieked in annoyance before flapping hard and flying off. It caught an updraft from the sun-heated stone of the mountain and circled skyward before disappearing above the summit of the temple.

The firekeeper spat a black gob, then said, “Here, give me a hand with this.”

It led Kratos over to the bowl and handed the Spartan its staff, leaning his nub of arm bone against the searing bowl for balance. “Poke that bugger in for me, will you?”

Kratos used the staff to shove the corpse into the bowl, reflecting that at least he’d figured out why the staff was charred at one end. “You said you open the gate.”

“It opens at my command.”

“Then do it.”

“In my own time, Spartan. You think you can conquer the Temple of the Gods? It’s never been done, you know. Sooner or later, the harpies will bring what’s left of you back for me to burn. If I were you, I’d leave now.”

“I will leave,” Kratos said, “when I have the box.”

“And luck to you on that.” The decrepit undead chuckled. “You want water? Food? Armor? There’s not much, but take what you will.”

“Why?”

“Why give you supplies?” One bony shoulder lifted in a shrug. “Why not? It’s not like I have any use for them myself.” With the nub of arm bone, it pointed toward its guts-or, rather, to the ragged gap where his stomach, liver and bowels ought to be. “Bloody vultures got my innards decades ago.”

“Where’s the food?”

“Over there,” the decrepit creature said. “I rob the bodies.”

“Of what? For what?”

“Whatever they’ve got. For fun, mostly. It’s the only interesting part of my job. Never quite know what you’ll find.”

Kratos hefted a half-empty water skin. The water inside smelled like goat. “Drink up,” the creature said. “And here’s some decent meat. Hardly any maggots at all. I got it off a body only a day back. Or was it two? Five? You lose track of the days out here. One’s pretty much like the next, and both today and tomorrow are like all the ones before.”

Kratos drank of the water and ate what he could. The worms tasted better than the meat they infested. He licked what little grease there was off his fingers and wished for more. He drank the last of the water in the skin. The undead seemed not to mind. Why should he? Then he donned bronze armor from the pile.

When Kratos had finished, he frowned at his host.

“I can see your curiosity, eh? You want to know my story. Questions, questions. It’s always the same,” the firekeeper said. “Madmen seeking power, and fools seeking glory. I know. Too well I know. As you can see by what’s left of me”-it indicated it’s maimed form-“I was no luckier than the rest of them. Unluckier, really. At least they got their burning and their souls released to the Lord of the Underworld. I got… this.” It swung its staff about, showing the area filled with the pilfered possessions and the huge fire bowl.

“You attempted to conquer the temple?”

“That I did, and I’m sorry for it now. I was the first mortal to enter the temple. And so I was the first to die. As punishment for my presumption, Zeus doomed me to tend this corpse fire for all eternity-or until Pandora’s Box is taken. Which is close enough to eternity, for no man will ever gain the box.”

The creature nodded toward the towering gates and gave out a whistling sigh. “The Architect-he who built this temple-was a zealot. He lived only to serve the gods, and for that he got the same reward we all do: an eternity of madness. The tale is that he’s still alive, still inside, still trying to appease the gods who abandoned him centuries ago.”

Kratos stepped closer and stared into the fire, where bodies sizzled and popped.

“I see your question. How many bodies a day do I burn? Go on. You can ask. I tried counting, for the first few years, that is. I gave up after the tenth year. Five a day? A dozen? I know your questions, I do, since I’ve heard ’em all before. Did every one slay desert Sirens and sound the horn to get here? Did I?”

Kratos grunted, looked past the remnant of a man, and studied the gates for a way to open them. If he could not, he might scale the walls beside the bronze-and-wood gates. But he recognized the danger in that, with the harpies fluttering around above, eyeing him hungrily.

“You shouldn’t think so much,” the firekeeper said. “It’ll only make you crazy-but then, you’re here, so you must already be crazy.” The way it laughed warned Kratos of something more. “You’re right to question me. I know what happened to you because you didn’t question the gods.”

A fist of dread clenched in Kratos’s guts. He fixed his gaze on the firekeeper.

“I know you are the Ghost of Sparta.” The empty eye socket glimmered as though the undead stared at him intently. “I know why your skin is white as ash.”

Kratos lurched forward and seized the firekeeper by the throat. “Your job is difficult for a creature missing a hand and a foot. Imagine how difficult it will be when you’re missing your head.”

“You’ll have no luck entering the temple if that gate stays closed.” Kratos’s grip didn’t impede the creature’s mocking speech. “Think it over, Ghost of Sparta. Can you risk mindlessly serving your lust for blood? After what happened last time?”

With a wordless snarl of frustration, Kratos cast the firekeeper to the ground. Chuckling, the creature rose and hopped over to grab a skull from the ground. With speed and accuracy astonishing for such a broken creature, the firekeeper hurled the skull at an outcropping above. It shattered against the stone, its impact disturbing a pair of harpies. They fluttered down toward some sort of mechanism at the top of the massive gate. Kratos could not see what they did, but soon the gate began to lift slowly, as one harpy on each side flapped frantically to lift with all her might. The gates ratcheted upward and locked in place. “See you soon, Ghost of Sparta!” the firekeeper cried. “I’ll see you again when the harpies drop you in my bowl!”

Kratos strode through the gate without a backward glance.