God of War

TWENTY-FIVE

AS DAWN CARESSED the eastern desert with her rose-red fingers, Kratos stood on the roof of a huge building atop a mountain-the mountain that grew from the midst of the Temple of Pandora, which itself was built up from the mountain chained to the back of the laboring Titan who bore it on his eternal crawl through the Desert of Lost Souls.

And in the first gleam of Helios’s chariot on the far horizon, three huge figures around him shone and shimmered: statues, hundreds of feet tall, of the Brother Kings. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades stood facing one another, and the hands of all three were extended to support a disk the size of a marching field with a hole in the middle, like a wagon wheel of the same material as the statues themselves. This material-some mystical substance more transparent than glass-reflected the glints and highlights thrown off by the statues’ curves. Below where the golden chariot had yet to touch, the Brother Kings were wholly invisible.

Kratos trotted toward them. Athena had said the box rested at the summit of the temple, and obviously nothing stood higher than these. But when he reached them, their bases on the dawn-shadowed roof were not only invisible, they were insubstantial-as though the statues did not exist except in the light of dawn.

Kratos scowled upward at the images of the gods. His opportunity to reach the treasure they supported would last only as long as the dawn itself.

Zeus stood to the east, and so more of his statue was exposed to the dawn light. Kratos sprang to the figure of the King of Olympus and leaped high to see if he could touch the statue where the dawn struck it. At the top of his leap, he felt a surface warm and solid but more slippery than oiled glass. He drew one of the blades and leaped again to strike the statue. The only effect his blade could produce was to make the immense statue ring like a great crystal bell. Not so much as a scratch marred the nearly invisible surface.

But instead of fading like a sounding bell, this ring deepened and broadened, becoming louder and louder until Kratos had to clap hands over his ears against the growing pain. Poseidon’s statue was the next closest to the eastern edge of the roof. Kratos ran to it, steeling himself for the blast of sound he knew would come when he took his hands from his ears, then leaped into the dawn light and struck Poseidon, too, with a powerful blow from a Blade of Chaos.

The belling that rose was deeper, more resonant, and grew in power more swiftly than had the sound from Zeus. Farthest from the rise of dawn- appropriately enough, thought Kratos-stood Hades, King of the Underworld. And this note sparked by Kratos’s blow was darker and deeper still. The volume of their conjoined chord rose until it seemed to Kratos that there was nothing in the world except sound.

Hands over his ears did him no further good. He staggered to the central point between the three statues and fell to his knees. As the rising sun finally struck the spot where he huddled, what had been featureless stone became a magically clear window. Directly below him, he saw the chamber of the Architect, with its throne, on which the armored figure sat as though oblivious to the universe-destroying sonic blast from above.

This disk felt to be the same sort of substance as the statues, which his best effort had not managed to even scratch. Now that he thought of it, though, he recalled a tale of the great brass gong of Rhodes; it was said to ring so powerfully that it shattered glass for a league or farther. Since it seemed as if much more of this noise would do the same to his skull, Kratos decided there could be no harm in trying. He reached down to the transparent disk and rapped it sharply, once, with his knuckle.

The disk instantly shattered with a sharp report, scattering shards so tiny as to become dancing motes of dust. The awful sound fell to instant silence. Kratos plummeted through the hole like a stone down a well.

A convulsive wrench of his body twisted him enough in the air that he could catch himself by straddling the Architect, one foot on either arm of the throne.

The throne began to rotate, with much grinding and clattering of gears. Kratos sprang from the arms to the dais on which the throne rested. The rotation stopped.

“So, Architect,” Kratos said. “You foretold my death, yet here I am.”

The Corinthian helmet turned just enough that Kratos could see cold green fire through the eye slits. “ No man has ever survived the Arena of Remembrance.”

“Until now.”

“But Pandora’s Box will never be yours.”

The Architect raised an armored finger, and the lid of the box on his lap slid open. Kratos seized the Architect’s wrist in a grip no mortal being could break. The armor was shockingly warm.

“No more tricks,” Kratos said. “Tell me how to reach the box, and I will let you live.”

“ You will not, for I am not.”

Kratos tightened his grip on the Architect’s wrist until the armor buckled under his fingers. “You’re alive enough to speak, so you’re alive enough to suffer.”

“ Do as you will.”

Kratos snarled and clenched his fist. The armor crumpled like a dry leaf, but from his crushing grasp, no blood flowed-only steam, hot enough to scald Kratos’s hand. With a curse, Kratos wrenched on the arm, and it tore away at the shoulder. From the severed joint hissed another burst of steam, which faded away as a metal plate within the armor slid into place over the hole.

Kratos scowled down into the armor-empty of flesh or bone, containing only brass tubing and gears of unfamiliar design. “What manner of creature are you?”

“I am,” said the voice, which Kratos now noted seemed to come from beneath the dais rather than from the helmet, “what remains of the Architect. I am his final device.”

Kratos’s eyes widened. “The Antikythera…”

“I control the temple. I am the keeper of its final challenge. Look into the box on my lap.”

Kratos stepped closer and peered into the device filled with a multitude of tiny rods-needles, Kratos realized-set on end and packed together. Here and there some of these needles were depressed to one height or another; the depressions were exactly the diameter of the armored fingers in the empty gauntlet in Kratos’s hand. He guessed their height and conformation somehow controlled the various mechanisms throughout the temple. There were also needles mounted horizontally on all four walls.

“Press them. Anywhere.”

Kratos considered this. There could easily be more going on in this box than just the needles, and those were discolored at their tips. Poison? What poison could still kill after a thousand years?

If anyone would have known the answer to that question, it would have been the Architect.

Instead of his own finger, Kratos used the armored finger of the gauntlet he held. Instantly, the horizontal needles licked out from the walls and stabbed the finger of the gauntlet. Rebounding from the bronze, the needles returned to their places.

“ Had you pressed with your own finger, your hand would be trapped-pinned in place by the needles, and you would be dying, in tremendous pain, from the blood of the Lernaen Hydra that paints every tip.”

“So? I must guess the shape that will reveal Pandora’s Box?”

“No,” the Architect-or, rather, the Antikythera-replied. “ I will tell you: It is the shape of a man’s face, pressed into the needles.”

Kratos thought about the many statues and reliefs throughout the temple-surely the head of a man-sized statue…

“ The face must be of flesh. The needles must drive fully in and remain in place,” the emotionless voice said. “ To reach Pandora’s Box, a man must die.”

Kratos thought of the man in the cage; for one brief moment, he regretted having killed the old fool.

“ And this is your only chance. This conformation of the needles will work only for a tiny span after the window above is shattered. Once the Chariot of Helios rules the sky, the statues-and the box on the disk they bear-will vanish into the noonday light. Only you have reached this far. No one to follow will have a chance at all.”

Kratos nodded. He appreciated the elegant intricacy of this final trap. He said, “But you always-that is, the Architect, your creator-leave one way through.”

“Until now.”

Kratos squinted up at the disk supported by the hands of the Brother Kings, far above in the shining sun. He now saw a speck upon it, and his heart swelled with rage. He had not come so far to be denied. Here, where he could see the box, he would not allow himself to fail.

“Athena herself has told me that there is no way out of this temple without Pandora’s Box,” he said. “So I will die here, in success, or die later for my failure.”

“ You are about to die.”

“Since I am about to die, there is no further need for secrets, is there?” Kratos said. “Tell me why this temple was designed in this way-tell me why each trap, maze, and puzzle has a solution? Why design fantastical defenses around the most powerful weapon in creation-but deliberately design each of them with a hole?”

“Because Zeus commanded it so.”

“Zeus?” Kratos frowned. “But why?”

“I am a loyal servant of the gods. I do not question. I obey.”

The logic was obvious: Zeus commanded that every puzzle have an answer, every trap an escape, and the Architect was fanatically loyal. Which could only mean that this final deadly puzzle was no different from the others.

The Architect had placed his sons in coffins. At Zeus’s bidding? Their heads had proven to be the key to gaining entry to progressively dangerous challenges. Twice this had happened. Twice. Would the Architect so misuse his children unless…

“One last question.”

“Your time is growing short.”

“I know,” Kratos said, thinking, So is yours. “My final question: How can a mere device, a steam-powered mechanism, no matter how cleverly designed, understand and respond to whatever I say?”

Without waiting for a reply, Kratos sprang to the rear of the throne with pantherish agility and seized with both hands the Corinthian helmet that rested upon the armored shoulders. It seemed to be more firmly anchored than the arm had been. Kratos had to twist fiercely and wrench upward with all his strength to rip it free. Then he tucked the helmet under one arm and reached inside with his other hand, scooping out what he found as he would a snail from its shell.

It was a human head. Whatever hair once adorned it had centuries ago crumbled to dust, but this head clearly still held some semblance of life. Tears spurted from its rolling eyes, its mouth worked silently, and the voice from below the dais finally exhibited some emotion.

Terror.

“Stop! What are you doing! You can’t!”

“I can.” He thought he should really tell the ancient undead who tended the fires out front that he’d been right all along and that the insane Architect of the Temple of Pandora did still live, haunting his millennial masterpiece.

In his hands was the key to the final lock. Kratos saw no reason to hesitate.

“No! No no no PLEASE-”

Kratos jammed the undying head of the Architect face-first into the box. The pipe-and-reed voice below the dais screamed in panic and despair as the poisoned needles stabbed out from all four walls of the box and upward from below. They lodged in his face, in his neck, drove through his temples, and punctured his eyeballs as one might lance a boil. With his lips pinned to his teeth, even the Architect’s artificial voice could only moan and whimper without words.

The walls of the chamber groaned as they came alive to lower themselves around Kratos. An instant later, he realized that it was the dais of the throne where he stood that was instead lifting, becoming a rising pillar of stone that went up, and up, fitting perfectly through the hole left in the ceiling by the shattered window. Outside it rose still more, and more, lifting Kratos and the throne hundreds of feet into the air, until finally it thrust him up through the hole in the center of the enormous disk… and stopped.

Kratos stood for a moment, feeling the eyes of the Brother Kings upon him. Only a pace or two in front of him stood a vast chest, as tall as Kratos and thrice as wide, constructed of impossibly lustrous metalwork that surrounded golden jewels larger than his head.

And so: There it was. Pandora’s Box.

At last.

But Kratos felt no relief, no triumph, for this was not the end of his quest. It was only one more point along the way. The end of this story must lie in Athens.

He glanced upward and saw that the head of Zeus’s statue had vanished down to his eyebrows, dematerializing in the rising sun of day. As he watched, the cirrus clouds of Zeus’s eyebrows evaporated. And then so did the top of Poseidon’s head.

He sprang from the throne, raced across the transparent disk toward the enormous box, and discovered a new problem when he tried to come to a stop-he couldn’t. He slid right into the box with breathtaking impact, which also pushed the box a few paces farther from the throne pillar.

The mysterious substance was still more slippery than oiled glass.

Kratos looked around in desperation as he carefully circled to the far side of the box. Flames trapped within the sides blazed. The golden gems encrusting the top pulsed with energy. But none of this helped him. He’d never get enough purchase on this surface to push or pull something so massive. If only he had something to throw, perhaps he could knock it on its way… but what could he throw that would have enough heft to move the box?

It struck him then that the placement of the box on the disk would not have been an accident-it was almost halfway to the rim. And it rested exactly on the line between the throne pillar and the statue of Zeus, as though this final test had been designed specifically for him: Looking up at the vanishing statue of the Skyfather, Kratos realized that Zeus himself had given him the one and only possible way to move that enormous weight on this impossibly slick surface in so short a time.

He took a few careful paces toward the statue and inclined his head. “Lord Zeus. Did you foresee this moment? Is this why you granted me a fraction of your power?”

With no answer forthcoming, Kratos wheeled and reached back over his right shoulder to grasp the solid lightning of the thunderbolt. He took up a wide stance for balance and threw the thunderbolt at the disk just short of the box. The impressive detonation had exactly the effect Kratos had hoped for-the box slid a few feet toward the throne pillar. Six more thunderbolts pushed it to the very edge of the pillar itself. Kratos scrambled around to the firmer footing of the pillar and set his foot against the back of the Architect’s throne.

“You love the gods so much,” Kratos said as he kicked the throne off the pillar and sent it spinning toward the statue of Hades, “stay with them forever.”

He turned, took hold of a projecting piece of the box’s metalwork, and dragged the vessel of Ares’s destruction onto the pillar-which immediately began to descend.

On the long, long trip downward, Kratos could only stare at the box pensively. He had been told this thing was a weapon-the only weapon that would allow a mortal to slay a god-yet Zeus had commanded the Architect to design the temple so that a mortal might achieve ultimate success and claim its power. He remembered the words of Athena: Zeus has forbidden the gods to wage war on one another. Such a decree must be binding even upon Zeus himself.

Had Zeus ordered a single path be left open because, even a thousand years ago, he had foreseen that someday a god must be killed?