God of War

TWENTY-EIGHT

KRATOS FELL, AND FELL, and fell alongside hundreds of other men and women falling beside him. He plunged through the blood-hazed gloom of Hades, falling toward the shores of the river Styx.

He knew this place.

He had been here before.

But his previous sojourn had been as a living man, a mortal invader among the shades of the dead. Now he was a shade himself-and no shade, no matter the greatness of the hero it had been in life, ever escaped from the kingdom of Hades.

He checked himself over as he fell endlessly. His skin appeared as white as it had been in life, his tattoos as red. His flesh felt as solid as it ever had, his arms as strong. No mark remained of the giant weapon that had ripped him out of mortal life. He felt, surprisingly enough, thoroughly fine.

He thought of his wife and child already in the underworld ahead of him. His punishment might be to kill them over and over for all eternity, unable to stop himself, in the same way as fresh fruit and pure water were eternally just beyond the grasp of Tantalus.

The wind whipped at his face; resolve hardened in his chest. He was a warrior of Sparta. Until he found himself in Charon’s boat, rowing across the river Styx, he was not dead. Not quite. What state he might actually inhabit was a question best left for a philosopher, since Kratos had never been interested in abstractions. He didn’t mind dying. He only wanted to make sure that the weeping shade of Ares reached the Styx first.

He had fallen so far that now he began to see the landscape of the underworld. Though he was still too high to see the river, he began to pick out solid-seeming bone-white structures that stood or crossed or loomed in the blood-colored gloom below. Falling still more, he discovered that these structures were bone white for a very good reason.

They were bones.

Bones too large to belong to even gods. Kratos fell past a rib cage in which each rib was larger than the Hydra’s master head. Below the ribs, he spied a spinal column in which each vertebra was the size of the Parthenon.

He tucked his arms tightly to his body and spread his legs just enough to tip him facedownward. As he fell, slight adjustments in the span of his legs, or the angle of one or both of his hands, kept him angling toward the great bony protuberances. He didn’t worry about how hard he was going to land. He was already dead; how much harm could it do? He plummeted toward the spine at an astonishing speed. As he fell closer and closer, he could make out the tiny figures of other shades who’d had the same inspiration-they sat or lay or clung desperately to the bones, seeming to want only to delay their final plunge to the Styx.

His last few yards passed at blinding speed, and the impact came in a shattering white flash-with no pain at all, which was what he had expected. What he had not expected was that he would bounce.

He found himself tumbling again, flailing. He struck another vertebra but skidded over the edge before he could get a grip. Scrambling desperately now, he clutched at anything he passed, because he was about to go over the edge of the tailbone and he didn’t see anything else between him and the sluggish black river that marked the border of Hades.

At the last instant, his hand caught something. He heard a scream of panic, and as he dangled by one hand above that all-too-final drop, he discovered that he had grabbed a bony, withered ankle.

“Let go, idiot!” the man he’d grabbed screamed. “I can’t hold us both!”

“Just hang on,” Kratos said through his teeth. “Hold tight and I’ll get us out of this.” Grimly, he pulled himself up to where he could get a grip on the man’s knee with his other hand.

“My arms,” moaned the man. “You’re pulling my arms out of their sockets! Let go!”

Kratos counted himself lucky: The man was so withered that the Spartan could close his hand around the fellow’s thigh.

The man tried to kick him off. “You won’t drag me down to that cursed river!”

“There’s a task left for me above,” Kratos growled, “and I will see it completed.”

“I don’t care! Let go!”

The man screamed as Kratos hauled himself higher and drove his hand like a spear deeply into the man’s side; he hooked his fingers over the man’s hipbone and kept on climbing.

His next handhold was at the man’s shoulder, then his other shoulder, and finally Kratos could grasp the same prominence that the other clung to. It was then a simple matter for Kratos to clamber up onto the vertebra. He turned back to the man he had used as a ladder.

It was the captain of the merchant ship from the Grave of Ships.

The captain recognized Kratos in the same instant. A look of pure horror twisted his face. “Oh, no. Not you again!”

Kratos stepped close to the edge and kicked the captain’s hands off the bone.

The captain had a penetrating voice, and Kratos heard him screaming curses as his shade cartwheeled downward to vanish in the blood mist above the Styx.

Kratos turned and scanned the skeletal landscape. He began to climb.

Scaling vertebra after vertebra, he toiled upward for an unknown span of time. The light here never changed, and Kratos never tired. He kept climbing.

When he reached the ribs, miles above where he had begun, he discovered a new feature of this peculiar realm: Undead. Skeletons. Legionnaires. But these were no naked shades; they were armored, armed with all manner of weapons, and thirsty for blood, as they had been in the world above.

They spread out to intercept his passage. As they moved into position, Kratos saw that they were not alone. Two Minotaurs bearing battle axes and a massive Centaur brandishing a sword as long as Kratos was tall stood with them. The Centaur looked familiar.

“I know you, Spartan!” the Centaur growled. “You sent me here only days ago, on a street in Athens.”

“And it’s so with all of you, isn’t it? I killed you all.”

The Centaur grinned hugely, opening his arms as if in welcome. “And all of us are here to return the favor!”

Kratos looked farther up and discovered he could chart his path by noting where creatures waited for him. Every bone that led upward was crowded with enemies who had died at his hands. He began to climb the bone up to the first group. The Centaur bellowed, whirling his enormous sword around his head.

HOURS-DAYS, MONTHS, DECADES -Kratos spent in battle. Still he never tired, and the light never changed, and he never ran out of enemies. He climbed and then he fought. He jumped, then found himself facing a column of immense height-studded with counterrotating segments of viciously sharp blades.

Kratos stepped back and tried to see the top of the column. It vanished into the blood-red mists above. The swish swish of the rotating blades cut through the air but could not drown out the cries of men and women falling to Lord Hades’s embrace far below. Kratos had come a considerable distance to reach this point, and there was more to go if he wanted to kill a god.

Taking a deep breath, Kratos watched the blades whirling about and judged the “safe” rings-but he knew they could never be considered islands of refuge. The rings did not spin at uniform rates. Some above went faster, while those on either side rotated more slowly. Once he started the climb, there would be no turning back, no rest, not an instant of hesitation.

Two quick steps and a jump took him above the first ring of curved blades. Kratos almost found his escape from Lord Hades’s grip at an end as the blade under his left foot cut off part of his sandal. He jerked upward and almost foolishly looked down.

No rest. No stopping.

The blades above came fast at eye level. Scrambling, finding purchase against the ever-moving rings, a toehold and a hard push upward barely allowed him to escape decapitation. He slowed, then shot upward, fingers finding the right gripping points to avoid the next ring of blades and the next and the next. Then he saw that the ring above rotated against the others and forced him to retreat. Kratos dropped down, but surged up when a break came in the deadly ring.

He found a rhythm to the climb, a certain logic to the seemingly random whirl of death around him. But a screech from behind warned him of a harpy coming at his back. Not daring to take his attention from the segmented tower of blades, he kept climbing.

Blood spattered his back and ran in thick rivers to drip down to the spot where he had begun the climb. The harpy had incautiously attacked him and ignored a set of blades coming from the opposite direction; it paid the price. A quick glance showed the headless body tumbling away in one direction. He never saw the head. He was too occupied with preventing such a fate from befalling him.

Twice, the flashing blades almost lopped off vital pieces of anatomy. One wound was minor, but a steady gush of blood came from a deep cut to his ribs just as he saw the top of the deadly column. Sanctuary in sight spurred him on, and wind whistling from the blades chilled his body as sweat evaporated from his exertions.

Close to the pinnacle, with only one ring of blades to pass, Kratos surged upward, let a sharp edge graze his leg, and then tumbled flat onto the top of the column. He immediately found himself faced with a tall legionnaire armored in flames. Kratos somersaulted, came to his feet, and brought the Blades of Chaos into his hands. The climb had set his pulse racing, and every sense was heightened. The legionnaire had no chance against his quick cuts and sudden leap high into the air. He hurtled downward, the blades preceding him. The legionnaire exploded in a ball of fire as the tip of one blade drove down hard onto the back of the undead’s skull.

Kratos stood, staring at the pile of ash that marked the legionnaire’s final resting place. He kicked the ash over the edge, sending it floating eventually to drift on the river Styx.

Looking around, he saw nowhere to go from the apex of the column. Kratos looked back down through the blur of spinning blades. If he had to retreat and find another way, he would. As he stepped to the edge to begin his descent, a new sound filled the air, drowning out the cries of those unfortunates falling to the underworld. He jumped back in time to avoid being crushed by a heavy block.

A grim smile curled Kratos’s lips. Tied to the block was a rope that vanished upward. He might have to deal with harpies, but the spinning blades of the column beneath his feet were a danger past. Gathering his strength, he bent his legs and exploded upward, grasping the rope as far above as possible. Hand over hand, he continued his escape as he went through dozens-or thousands-of weapons looted from the corpses of his enemies. Though a shade, he could be hurt by these enemies, he discovered, but victory healed his wounds.

The underworld behind him vanished as he clambered higher, finally seeing a ceiling above. Kratos wondered at what appeared to be roots dangling from the bottom. As he got closer, he saw that they were roots-roots of living plants from the world above. The living world above!

Kratos climbed faster and followed the rope into a hole that blocked all senses. His shoulders brushed dirt, and then the hole narrowed even more-but the rope still stretched taut above him. Ascending more slowly, he felt himself being crushed and smothered, and he knew the smell in his nostrils and the taste in his mouth.

Dirt. Clay.

Earth.

He spat out a mouthful of grit and sealed his lips. With an effort greater than he’d ever before believed he could summon, Kratos forced his hands and then his arms to move. He pressed his limbs outward, using his great strength to pack the smothering earth away from him, opening a little room to work. He began to move his legs as well, struggling to bend his knees or widen his stance. His heart hammered, and his lungs burned for air…

He told himself repeatedly, Shades don’t need to breathe.

Without pausing to marvel at this miracle or to ponder the question of its source, Kratos clawed his way upward, snarling and gasping and forcing his weakening limbs to move, to climb, to rip apart the dirt above him and break through to light and air. Just when his pounding heart seemed to be choking him to death, his hand broke through.

Fresh air gusted into his face. His fatigue vanished. Furiously, he attacked the imprisoning earth until he could see a night shrouded by clouds glowing blood-red with the light of fires below.

“Athens,” he croaked. “I’m in Athens…”

He pulled himself up to the mouth of the hole he had dug and discovered there were still six more feet to go.

He stood in an open grave.