God of War

TWENTY

HEAT BLASTED KRATOS as he stepped out into the desert sun. Slowly, he turned his face upward and basked in the light, relishing it after being trapped inside the darkened maze. He sucked in a deep breath and felt the air sear his lungs. The wounds in his side were almost healed, and he swung his arms about, feeling the power flow once more through his muscles. Along with this, the poison that had threatened his vision was purged from his system. The blinding was a memory he cared not to revisit-but it was one of the few memories he could be free of.

He had no time to linger, because memory of what Ares was doing to Athens goaded him as much as his hatred for the God of War. Athena had warned that time was critical, and lazing about like a lizard on a hot rock accomplished nothing.

He ran along a paved pathway to the base of the altar where the large sarcophagus gleamed in the sunlight. Kratos squinted against the brilliant reflection as he stepped to the edge of the bier, then pulled himself up so he could look down at the lid. Someone of great importance had been interred within such a gaudy coffin. His fingers curled around the edge, and he applied his prodigious power to rip away the covering, exposing a desiccated body within.

“This is all?” He looked upward to the heavens, arms outstretched. “This is all you have sent me?” Kratos bent, grabbed the head of the skeleton, and jerked hard. The head came away easily, leaving behind a cloud of dust from its ruined spinal cord. He cocked his arm back and flung the skull high, as if he could assail Olympus itself with this relic to show his disdain.

The skull arrowed upward, then came back down, retracing the trajectory to land in Kratos’s outstretched hands. Again he threw it, this time outward. It tumbled whitely in the sun and then described a circular path to return. Kratos started to heave it aloft once more, then common sense took over and replaced his blood rage. If the skull proved this difficult to get rid of, perhaps he ought to keep it.

He dropped down beside the bier and ran his fingers over the glyphs etched into the golden sides. Little by little, the words became clear. Kratos rocked back and stared at the skull he held in the palm of his hand.

“The son of the Architect? Your father placed your miserable body inside this fine coffin? To what-” He spun at the grating sound as stone dragged over stone and a huge cavity opened at the base of the altar.

Kratos threw back his head and roared in defiance, then jumped. He cleared the edge of the pit and fell for what seemed an eternity. But he didn’t fall all the way to Hades, impacting hard on the bottom of the pit. In a crouch, he looked around and saw only one possible corridor to follow. Lifting the skull, he stared into the empty eye sockets.

“Have you seen this before? Did your father betray you as Ares did me?” Kratos expected no answer and got none. He ran down the decrepit corridor, alert for an enemy attack. When he reached the end, a huge door emblazoned with a skull insignia blocked his way, and Kratos pressed against the door, trying to force it.

When it didn’t budge, he got his fingers under the edge and tried to lift, until his back felt as if it would snap. Panting harshly, Kratos knew force would not triumph. But how could he defeat this door?

He stepped back two paces to get a better look at the pattern on the door. After several minutes of study, he let the anger always smoldering within him come rushing out. Two quick motions drew the Blades of Chaos so he could charge forward and bring the swords to bear against the heavy door. Striking repeatedly produced no results, though the air filled with the acrid stench of burned metal after a dozen hard strikes. Kratos growled, redoubled his effort, and finally stepped away, the rage not fading but a semblance of rationality sneaking in.

“The skull,” he said. “The door has a skull pattern etched into it.” He lifted the skull of the Architect’s son and positioned it so the design matched the outline on the door. Walking forward, he saw that a small depression in the center of the pattern matched the skull in his hand perfectly. He shoved it forward. For a moment he thought nothing happened; then he felt the skull being pulled from his grasp and dragged into the door itself, until only an outline remained.

Kratos reached down and unleashed his rage once more. This time the door lifted, slowly, one inch at a time. When he got the bottom even with his chest, he ducked, somersaulted, and came to his feet on the other side. As the heavy door crashed back into place, Kratos cried out in mindless fury. Keeping the darkness of his visions at bay had been easy enough as he dealt with the minions of Hades he had bested in the temple, but now the nightmarish reality swirled about him like a shroud swaddling the dead.

Fighting to hold the memories at bay, he stumbled blindly down the corridor as if he could outrun them, heading on and not caring where he blundered as long as the nightmares did not seize control of his mind. Blocking his way was the sprawled body of a warrior clad in Athenian-style armor, a sword still clutched in his lifeless hand. The only marks of the battle he had fought were the black reeking smears of undead blood that painted him from head to toe. Kratos stepped over the body and found scattered bones farther along the tunnel, which sloped gradually upward to an arched portal.

He looked through the doorway onto a hellish scene: a vast chamber lit by the fires of bodies of dead men. The stink of this black smoke was worse than the undead blood. At the center of the red-lit chamber, lent a gruesome illusion of life by the dancing flames, rose a huge pyramid of skulls.

A thousand skulls.

He knew the number because he had raised such pyramids himself in the past, when he served the god who was now his enemy. Pyramids like this one had been raised with the heads of the barbarian horde after Ares had answered Kratos’s prayer.

Try as he might, he found it impossible now to hold back the visions. Memories roared into him as the ocean floods through a shattered dike. The room, the temple, the quest for Pandora’s Box-all were ripped away from his mind, and the visions that seized him were of years ago, the good years, when he had been the youngest captain of Sparta, leading his ever-burgeoning corps to victory after victory…

THE BATTLEFIELD WAS SILENT, and it was the silence of death. He could hear only the crows and the vultures in the distance, cawing out to announce their bellies were full with the flesh of fallen soldiers. No other sound. Not even a moan of a wounded but still living man.

He heard no survivors because he had ordered it so. He had ordered complete death.

No quarter. No prisoners. No mercy.

His men had driven hard through the weaker army, and when their commander had tried to surrender, Kratos had slaughtered the envoys where they stood. Any soldier too wounded to leave the field had his throat slit by camp followers for the bounty, an ear taken as a trophy. Kratos paid his camp followers according to how many they slew .

Blood saturated the ground; walking among the piles of corpses was very much like slogging through mud after a heavy rain. Except this was blood. Gallons of blood. Blood from ten thousand slashes, stabs and slit throats.

HE FELT A MOMENT’S DIZZINESS- and the next he knew, he was mounted on horseback, waving his blood-soaked sword.

“CHARGE!” The command ripped from his throat and set his army in motion. Kratos bent low and swept his sword along as he rode. Warrior after warrior died as he rushed past. The bodies piled up. He laughed aloud as the Spartans rushed to…

… defeat.

Kratos lay on his back, staring up into a sky the color of an ugly bruise. Heavy clouds boiled above the battlefield, and the barbarians killed without quarter. All around, Kratos heard his finest soldiers dying as the barbarians slaughtered them. He tried to sit up but could not-one of his arms was pinned to the earth by a barbarian spear. He reached over and yanked the weapon from his arm.

Towering over him was the barbarian king, a vast spiked war mallet dripping with Spartan gore clutched in a brawny hand. His grin was scarlet with the blood he had chewed from Spartan necks. He strode forward, lifting the unstoppable mallet to crush the life from Sparta’s greatest general…

AND IN HIS NIGHTMARE, Kratos could not stop himself from yelling the same words he had screamed on that black day more than ten years ago.

“Ares! God of War!” The words echoed in his ears and his memory at once. “Destroy my enemies, and my life is yours!”

– -

THE BARBARIAN KING LIFTED his war hammer but hesitated when a flash of lightning illuminated the carnage. The king looked over his shoulder… and then above… and then he screamed in terror.

The clouds were pulled apart by Olympian hands, and down from the rent in the sky climbed a man larger than a mountain, with hair and beard of living flame. At the first touch of the god’s hand, the eyes of the barbarian king’s nearby soldiers burst open like drawn boils, black blood spurting from mouths and ears as lifeless bodies crumpled to the ground. Then the eyes of the men farther from him did the same, and then those beyond, until-as Kratos had demanded-all the enemies of Sparta lay dead, all save one.

Kratos screamed as the Blades of Chaos wrapped around his forearms and the chains burned through flesh to fuse with bone. He lifted the blades forged in the lowest level of Hades and stared at the scintillant swords. Without hesitation, he rushed forward, swinging the Blades of Chaos in front of him. When the barbarian king’s neck settled into the V formed by the blades, Kratos drew back hard. A scream of victory ripped from his lips as the barbarian king’s head leaped from his shoulders to go rolling across the battlefield.

Ares’s shadow fell across his newest protege…

KRATOS STAGGERED to find himself in the Temple of Pandora once more, his hands filled with the Blade of Artemis.

He mopped sweat from his forehead with a trembling hand.

He was grateful the visions had stopped when they did; who knew what other memory might take hold of him? That was a question he could not bear to answer.

“Athena, you promised to erase the memories and end these visions,” he muttered under his breath. “You cannot fail me.”

Fires burned, and the stench of flesh roasting gave him another moment’s pause. This, too, was familiar from his years in the service of the God of War, though it mercifully triggered no new flashback. Kratos slipped to the side in a crouch, keeping the great blue-gleaming blade low but ready.

Snuffling and gobbling sounds came from nearby-grunts and lip smacks, like a glutton at a feast. He cat-footed around the mound of severed heads, leaning to catch a glimpse of the feaster.

A Cyclops hunkered down, chomping at what could only be the haunch of a human. The broken yellowed teeth crushed the femur, allowing the Cyclops to noisily suck out the marrow. When it finished, it casually tossed aside the broken bone and hunted for another meaty haunch. As it ripped the second leg from the corpse, some feral instinct warned the creature of Kratos’s approach. It lifted its head, blinking its one great eye; its mouth hung slack, shreds of human flesh dangling from its carious teeth.

Kratos brought up the Blade of Artemis and kept coming. This Cyclops was merely a beast-it was not like its brothers of old, who had been great artisans and stoneworkers. This one looked too stupid to know what a pyramid was, let alone to build one. The monster could not be alone. “Where are your partners in this grisly feast?”

By way of answer, the Cyclops sprang to its feet and snatched up an iron rod longer than Kratos was tall. The bar hissed through the air and struck Kratos’s sword just above the hand guard.

Kratos turned the blade to meet the Cyclops’s weapon with its edge-and a hand span of iron sheared away from the bar and skittered off along the floor.

The monster’s eye bugged out, and it turned to flee. To Kratos, a retreating enemy was only one he hadn’t killed yet. He leaped after it, swinging the Blade of Artemis overhand to catch the beast on the back of its right shoulder and slice clean through without resistance. The creature’s huge meaty arm and gnarly knuckled hand fell to the ground.

Before the Cyclops understood how badly it had been hurt, Kratos spared it the shock. His next swing sent the blue-shining sword directly to where neck met shoulder. Muscle and bone gave way to the magical blade. When the razor edge severed the beast’s spine, its legs could no longer carry it away, and the creature pitched face-first to the floor, with a resounding thump.

As Kratos reached the doorway leading into another room twice the size of the one where the Cyclops had feasted, a wave of heat threatened to singe his beard; it seemed most of the next room was given over to a huge fire pit, not unlike the one outside the temple’s gate. Suspended over it by a long chain was a cage, and within the cage lay a body. Slowly, the chain lengthened, lowering the cage into the fiery pit.

Kratos stepped forward, then froze as he felt a thin wire pressing into his leg. He used the flat of the sword blade to trace the path of the wire. It led to a simple stone buttress supporting one smooth wall. Rather than stepping back and releasing what little tension he already applied to the wire with his leg, Kratos carefully drove the Blade of Artemis down into the stone, to keep the wire from slackening.

With the flat of the blade holding the wire taut and the sword itself secure in the floor, Kratos stepped back. Then he went to examine the buttress. The barely visible wire ran through a small hole at the base of the column. On the far side, the stone had been hollowed out where the wire wrapped around a clay jug stoppered with a cork.

If he had moved forward another inch, the wire would have pulled over the jug and caused the cork to pop out, spilling the contents. Kratos decided it was worth seeing what this trap would have done. He stepped back to the doorway and jerked the trip wire. The cork popped free, releasing a thick black stream from the mouth. He shook his head, chuckling. What a sorry trap! Even if the black treacle were a deadly poison, anyone triggering the trap would be long past.

But his laughter faded as the black treacle smoked and burned through the stone beneath. An instant later, the entire wall tipped and slammed to the stone with killing force-and the floor next to it, where a nimble man could have leaped to escape the falling wall, sank away into great pools of the burning black substance. A substance that destroyed stone in seconds-what would it have done to mere mortal flesh?

Kratos decided he could live with not knowing.

And now smoke or gas of some kind, released by the liquid as it burned through the stone, curled up from the bubbling black surface. A stray wisp trailed upward over his hand-and where the gas touched, his skin blackened, and blistered, and began to burn, and Kratos decided he could also live without knowing what this stuff would do to him if he breathed it. The section of floor on which he stood shifted and began to sink, as black oil boiled up through its joints.

Three or four yards to the side of the door in the new room stood another buttress, this one also supporting one of those ever-burning braziers. Kratos hurled one of the Blades of Chaos out to the full length of its chain and yanked back on it to make the blade chain wrap the brazier. Then he leaped through the door with all his force, using his anchored chain as a pivot point to whip his body out and over the black liquid in a tight arc that would have sent him safely to the stone beyond-except that the convenient brazier proved to be just a little bit too convenient. When his full weight hit the brazier, the device pulled out from the buttress on about a foot of rod, which ran back into the wall and triggered another dozen yards of floor to sink into the deadly fluid.

A desperate cast of his other blade slammed the edge deep into the stone of the ceiling, at a sharp-enough angle to support him for an instant or two. A superhuman yank on the chain of the other blade ripped the whole brazier right off the wall and allowed Kratos to swing himself away from the viscous death below-right into the vast fire pit that dominated the center of the room.

Every Spartan boy underwent a ritual of fire-walking at the age of ten, to be certain that the future warrior could master his fear instead of allowing fear to master him. Another man’s instinct would have been to spring back out the way he had come-but that way held only black slimy death and skin-charring gas. Kratos took a step for momentum, then sprang straight upward for the hanging cage. Its iron was hot enough to blister his fingers, but his impact set the thing swinging enough that he could launch himself beyond the fire pit.

He paused for a moment while he tried to catch his breath, just barely in the clear, and looked back from where he had come. His lungs burned from the deadly vapors. He jerked around when the withered man inside the cage rose from the floor where he had been curled and gripped the bars to stare at Kratos.

“There’s more, you know. The wall, the oil-that’s only the start.” The voice was cracked with age and raspy enough that Kratos could believe the ancient man who now approached might have breathed some of that gas from time to time. “You’d be well advised to retreat. You would have been the one in this cage if I hadn’t been caught here first.”

Kratos grabbed the bars and drew himself up to his full height, towering over the frail ancient inside the cage. “I wouldn’t have been trapped like a rat.”

“No? Then maybe you should charge right on. There must be more traps to catch the impulsive.” The man’s hair was singed, and his clothing was as black as the soot from cremated corpses. He nodded at the flames in the pit below them. “You’ll be back soon enough, in any case.”

“You’ve studied this trap. Tell me of it.” Kratos looked down into the fire and at strange spiral tubes that disappeared into the pit walls. They performed some service, but what he could not tell-and lacking that knowledge could be deadly.

“Since I’ve been here so long, I’ve had time to study and think. The heat boils water, and the Architect uses the steam to power great engines, like those Hero of Alexandria built.”

“An aeolipile? What does it power?” Kratos asked.

“The Antikythera that controls the entire Temple of Pandora.”

“I have heard of the steam device but not this Antikythera. If the fires died, would it stop functioning?”

“There must be many fire pits like this,” the parbroiled remnant of a human being said. Kratos knew he lied. “Ceasing steam generation here would mean nothing once you reached the guts of the temple.”

“Where do I go in?”

“There, if you’re brave enough!” The man pointed to a huge locked door embossed with the sigil of Zeus. Kratos thought the man told the truth, but there had to be more. “Now that I’ve aided you, free me from this cage.”

After only brief consideration, Kratos knew what had to be done. He began swinging the cage in ever broader arcs so he could reach the edge of the pit.

“Thank the gods! I will be forever grateful to you.”

“Be content knowing your sacrifice serves the gods’ purpose,” Kratos said. His toes found purchase at the side of the pit, and he was again on firm footing, next to a lever controlling the position of the cage. He pushed the long wooden arm on the device around so the cage dangled over the middle of the fiery pit once more.

“No, you can’t do this. All I want’s to live.”

“The gods require a living sacrifice,” Kratos said. From what he could discern, only this tribute to the gods would open the way to the next portion of the temple for him.

“Please, no! Please!”

Kratos pulled the lever. Below, burners ignited and sent up waves of rippling heat. The man screamed as Kratos lowered the cage into the consuming fire.

“Accept my sacrifice, Lord Zeus,” Kratos intoned, “and watch over me as I go on.”

He ignored the screams of agony from the pit and went to the doorway leading away from this abattoir. Pandora’s Box was nearly in his grasp.

He tasted Ares’s blood already.