God of War

TWENTY-FOUR

KRATOS STOOD in a circular room with two arches exactly opposite each other that opened on corridors leading away. He rocked back, expecting creatures or fighters to pour through one or both of the archways. Back pressed against a blank wall, he waited for death to rush forth.

Nothing came.

He looked around, baffled. Had there been one other room in this entire infinite, ancient complex that did nothing at all? No monsters. No death traps. No impassable obstacles.

Two exits. That was all.

For the first time, he was starting to worry.

He walked to one archway and peered through. The floor turned in a downward spiral, cutting off his view of what lay more than a few feet away. He pressed his ear against the wall. Nothing. He spun about, sword leveled… but nothing was creeping up behind him.

The other archway differed from the first only in that the corridor spiraled upward instead of down.

A simple choice. A straightforward choice. Up or down. Athena had said that Pandora’s Box rested at the summit and that downward lay only defeat and death. He supposed he’d gone a bit far to start doubting the goddess now. He moved carefully onto the upward spiral, stalking upward with blades in hand, ready for anything. Almost anything.

Anything except what he found.

The space he came upon was huge, open to a midnight sky and the cold shimmer of countless stars. There was light here, though: firelight. This firelight was the color of burning cities, and it shone from the hair and beard atop the mountainous figure of the armed and armored god before him.

A terrible icy shock raked his body and shook him like a dead leaf in a winter gale. His voice came out a whisper, a bare breath.

“Ares…”

Gods always hear their name when called, even if only in the dream of some creature on the far side of the world. Kratos’s whisper brought the God of War wheeling about like a thunderstorm spinning into a tornado.

“Kratos…” Ares’s voice grated like a landslide. “I knew you were too stupid to run from me forever!”

And, now that the end had come, Kratos discovered he was ready for this after all.

“Run? From you?” Kratos shouted at the top of his lungs, throwing wide his arms to flourish the Blades of Chaos. “You trained me too well-I learned too much to ever run!”

Ares drew his warship-size blade with a sound like the screams of murdered children. His flaming hair rained fire down upon Kratos as the god stepped forward. “ You talk like a man, but you shake like a woman. Did your wife shiver so? ”

All hope of restraint incinerated in the white fire of Kratos’s rage. He hurled himself at the god with every shred of his superhuman strength, releasing the Blades of Chaos and drawing the sword given him by Artemis from behind his neck. As he fell, he drove the irresistible edge of the blade down like a spike through the foot of the god.

The blade of Artemis drove into Olympian flesh to its very hilt-and Ares laughed.

“I thank you, Spartan. Sand fleas had given me a terrible itch.”

“I’ll give you more,” Kratos snarled, as he rolled himself across the god’s instep. He leaped headlong up toward Ares’s knee, Artemis’s sword raised to slice the hamstring-but the huge blade of the god flashed downward and slapped Kratos from the air as though the Spartan were no more than a wasp or a biting fly.

Kratos hurtled through the air until he crashed into a wall with stunning force. The rock at his back crumbled, and he slid down it to the ground, trying to shake the blurriness from his eyes and the ringing from his ears.

The god had bladed him. Slapped him with the flat of the blade, as a Spartan father disciplines a naughty child.

Ares didn’t respect him enough to use the edge.

“ And why should I? ” said the god, as if he could hear Kratos’s thoughts. “You would be no more than picked bones and crow shit had I not saved you. Do you remember, Spartan? Do you remember falling to your knees with tears on your cheeks, as you begged me-begged like a whipped cur, like a slave- to save your worthless life? If one of your men had begged you thus, you would have killed him for dishonoring Sparta!”

“You should have killed me,” Kratos growled. “My weakness dishonored Sparta-and all the world would be better today if I had died on that field.”

“Your Spartan honor means nothing to me. You begged. I answered. I arose from my bed on Olympus and descended upon that field to dry your tears. To fight your battle for you. To win where you had lost. To triumph where you had failed.”

The god lifted one house-size foot, as if to crush Kratos like an ant beneath his sandal. Kratos tried to dive out of the way, but the god was as fast as he was huge. The sandal pinned Kratos facedown to the ground. Kratos tasted dirt and blood, and in that second he saw himself again, battered to the bloody earth by the immense war mallet of the barbarian king. He heard his voice cry out to Ares and swear eternal servitude.

“Do you remember what you said to me that day? The price you set for your worthless survival? Say it now, Kratos. Say it.”

The pressure of the vast sandal crushing his back increased. Kratos felt his ribs cracking, and he could no longer draw a breath.

And he heard in his memory the words he had spoken on that day.

My life is yours, Lord Ares. I swear it.

But here and now he could not make his lips form the words. He tried-he did try, telling himself that nine little words meant nothing, that to give the god his petty victory would mean Kratos might yet have another chance to recover Pandora’s Box and face the blood-mad Olympian on equal terms-but the words would not come out.

He couldn’t even truly think them.

The room and the crushing weight of the god all vanished behind the visions, the waking nightmares that had turned his life to an ocean of blood and suffering.

He had served Ares not only with his sword arm but with his whole heart, his mind, and every scrap of his gift for unstoppable brutality.

THE ARMY OF SPARTA became invincible. Opposing warriors quaked in fear to see Kratos’s Spartans take the field; at the first javelin cast, they dropped their weapons and ran home to tremble behind their mothers’ skirts. The Fist of Ares gave no quarter. Fleeing soldiers would be cut down, to a man. Parties suing for peace were brutally slaughtered. All the world trembled before the battle cry of the Spartans when Kratos stood at their head.

No quarter. No prisoners. No mercy.

Many were the princes who pled with Kratos to accept their surrender, to save a remnant of their army and their city, even if it meant slavery in a Spartan kitchen. He refused to hear such pleas. Surrender was never granted. Victory or death in battle were the only acceptable outcomes-Kratos expected no less from his own soldiers.

Kratos told his soldiers that he killed because Ares commanded him-but in truth he killed for his own pleasure. He killed because slaughter was his gift. His passion. Because he loved nothing more than the smell of blood, the screams of the dying, the sight of an army of corpses rotting on the battlefield.

“AND IF THAT WERE TRUE,” rumbled the god who now held him pinned in the arena, “you would still be the Fist of Ares on earth, and the world would still quake at the merest rumor of Sparta marching out to war. It was because you did not love me enough, Kratos. Because your heart still held close your-”

“No…” Kratos croaked out with the last of his voice. “No…”

The visions took him wholly now: He saw himself on the very last night he had served the God of War.

“THE VILLAGERS PRESUME to kneel first before Athena! Before Athena! This place is an affront to Ares! Burn it to the ground!”

Kratos grabbed a torch and sent it spinning through the night to land atop a thatched roof. The tiny sparks became a fire and then the entire roof collapsed, devouring the hut in minutes.

With a battle cry, Kratos led his horde of savage murderers into the village. The few villagers coming out to defend their homes were armed with shovels and planting sticks, without hope of resistance against his battle-hardened warriors. Kratos strode through the melee, hacking and slashing, killing without effort, without even really noticing whom he might be slaying… until he came to the village temple.

The Temple of Athena. And the wizened, age-crabbed old witch of an oracle who thought to bar his passage…

A knot formed in his belly. The stench of burning meat combined with wood and thatch as house after house was reduced to cinders. The temple looked deserted. But some dark foreboding gave Kratos pause…

But…

It was a shrine to Athena. Its existence was the reason for this massacre. How could he leave it standing?

“Everyone out!” he shouted, rapping hard on the thick wood door with the pommel of his sword. When no one answered, he stepped back and used the Blades of Chaos to reduce the door to splinters. A small, hunched-over Nubian woman shuffled out. She wore a shining green gown marked with the letter omega on the front.

“Sacrilege,” she said, shaking her finger at him. “Beware of blaspheming ’gainst the goddess, Kratos! Do not enter this place!”

Kratos backhanded the old woman, knocking her to the ground. “Never presume to give a Spartan orders.”

He kicked open the door and rushed into the temple. Two priests came toward him. The Blades of Chaos flashed and delivered fiery death to both men. Kratos roared in rage when other supplicants in the temple stirred. He rushed forward, not needing to even see his victims as he cut left, right, left, and then plunged ahead. There was no thought of restraint, no need for caution; there was only blood and death and triumph, Kratos in his element… and so he did not heed the last of his victims, and he did not hesitate to slaughter the last two supplicants in the village temple: a woman, and her young daughter…

THE TERRIBLE SHOCK of what he had done shattered the vision and brought him back to the temple arena where the god now crushed out his life. But at that instant, miraculously, the weight on his back vanished. Ares had lifted his foot away and once more returned to the center of the huge arena.

“Come on, you contemptible nothing, you insane murderer! You wanted to fight-let’s fight!”

Kratos picked himself up from the floor and shook the fog out of his head. The foot that the god had lowered upon his back had been the same one he’d stabbed with Artemis’s sword. He saw clearly the gouge left in the stone by the magical blade as it had spiked down through godly flesh…

But that gouge in the floor was dry as the Desert of Lost Souls outside.

There was no blood.

Kratos looked at the wall behind him, at the smear of shadows he cast in the light of the ubiquitous braziers. He looked at the wall beyond Ares, where the god’s gargantuan form cast no shadows at all.

Ares wasn’t Ares. The god wasn’t real.

“I am real enough to break you, Spartan. You want to kill me? Come on and try, you miserable mortal!”

Kratos’s ribs still ached with the memory of the god’s sandal crushing him to the floor; blood still trickled from a gash on his skull where his skin had split under the impact of the flat of Ares’s blade. Though it seemed Kratos could not harm this Ares, the reverse clearly did not apply.

“Why do you wait? Do you realize now how hopeless it is to try to kill a god?”

Kratos did want to kill Ares. His lust for the god’s blood burned like sun fire in his veins. But this was not Ares. No wonder the god seemed to be reading his mind-t his phantasmal “god” was itself a product of his mind.

Like the barbarian king in his visions.

Like his nightmares of his wife and his daughter.

To destroy this phantom Ares, Kratos would have to be strong enough to prevail against his own mind-but if he had such strength, he would never have needed to take service under Athena in the first place. He would have been strong enough to conquer his nightmares-to banish the memories of his crime-on his own. But he didn’t have that strength. He knew it. For ten years he’d labored to silence the voices in his head, to blind the eye of his memory. This phantasmal Ares was a foe he could never defeat until he conquered himself.

Kratos backed away.