He raised his right hand again, but his body betrayed him. His hand trembled, rebellious flesh refusing to grasp the lightning. The Sirens soothed and cajoled him to relax, not to use his weapon. They loved him. He wanted them more than he’d ever wanted anything.
A final twist of his will curled his fingers into the proper form, but his weakened arm could no longer hold his hand upraised. It fell to his side, and the thunderbolt in his grip blasted the sand in front of him to glass. The thunderclap and shock wave staggered him. Two steps back, three. He launched another thunderbolt. Again came the blast—but this time he could barely hear it.
“Well, all right, then,” he did not hear himself say. He set out toward the desert monsters at a walk—with purpose but without haste. The Sirens drifted back from him, exchanging glances that seemed to cry, “How can this mortal resist our power?” Suddenly the Sirens were uncertain that Kratos was human at all. They howled at him, pitching their voices in various harmonics—one chord could set a man afire, another could blind him, still a third could cause his skull to explode like a chestnut in a bonfire.
Kratos kept walking. He didn’t even bother to draw the blades.
The Sirens spread out as though to encircle him. But Kratos had dealt with Sirens before—and these Sirens, to their misfortune, had never dealt with Kratos.
They had never seen Kratos move faster than a walk, and they had no idea just how swiftly those powerful legs could drive his massive body. He allowed them to close in around him until he judged they were near enough, then, in a blindingly swift uncoiling of his mighty thighs, he sprang at one of the Sirens the way a tiger pounces on a goat.
With one great hand, he seized the Siren’s long, flowing hair, while with the other he punched her in the chest so hard that her sternum and clavicles shattered and ripped the upper part of her spine out her back.
He wrenched off her head and swung it by its hair like a flail. The nearer of the remaining two took her sister’s head square in the face, hard enough to shatter every monstrous bone in her skull and drop her dead on the sand. The last Siren turned to flee, but Kratos whipped the remains of the first Siren’s head around his own and hurled it like a throwing hammer. The severed head struck the fleeing Siren between the shoulder blades, hard enough to shatter her spine. Splinters of bone shredded her lungs, which put a stop to her hideous keening cry.
Kratos stood over the dying Siren for a moment, with nothing resembling pity on his face. He crushed her head with a stomp of his sandal.
He hurried up the steps into the razed structure. Oddly, though the place appeared to be a ruin, the stairways and corridors were all lined with burning lamps, so he had not the slightest difficulty seeing his way. He followed the light…
… and eventually burst out into daylight again, on a balcony of dizzying height, looking upon the endless sandstorm raging across the Desert of Lost Souls. Kratos paused to examine crude reliefs carved on the walls to either side. One depicted gods appearing before Pathos Verdes III, commanding him to build a mighty temple to house the greatest weapon on earth or Olympus. The other showed the temple being chained to the back of Cronos—a disrespectful way for Zeus to treat his own father, even if Cronos had tried to eat Zeus as soon as the future king was born. Chained to the stone at the far lip of the balcony stood a horn larger than Kratos’s whole body. Curious carvings raked backward along the length of the horn; precious jewels rimmed its far end. Heavy chains fastened the horn into place at the edge of the balcony. Kratos went to the smaller end of the great horn, put his lips to it, and blew.
A mighty blast roared from the horn’s opposite end, harrowing apart the swirling desert sands before Kratos and somehow holding them at bay to open a path before him. Far in the distance along this path, he glimpsed another structure, a grander and more curious one. As he squinted at it, trying to make out details, that mighty temple began to move toward him. Kratos sucked in his breath as he saw Cronos arch and cause the Temple of Pandora chained to his back to shake and rumble. Then the Titan, on hands and knees, turned and passed close to the edge of the balcony where Kratos watched.
Kratos had no time to think. He reacted. A heavy chain dangling from the Titan’s side swept past. With a powerful leap, Kratos launched himself into the air. His fingers closed about the chain, and then he was whipped about as Cronos changed direction and plunged back into the depths of the sea of sand.
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.
SEVENTEEN
THE BOOK LAY OPEN before a massive door like the eye of a god, its upper arch decorated with arcane symbols. The book itself seemed to be only a statue, a replica, carved from stone to look like a book on a pedestal—no real book could have survived exposure to the Desert of Lost Souls, open for a thousand years.
Its nature was irrelevant. All the import was conveyed by the words graven into its stone pages.
THIS TEMPLE WAS CONSTRUCTED IN THE HONOR OF AND AT THE COMMAND OF THE MIGHTY LORD ZEUS.
ONLY THE BRAVEST HERO SHALL SOLVE ITS PUZZLES AND SURVIVE ITS DANGERS. ONE MAN WILL RECEIVE ULTIMATE POWER.
ALL OTHERS SHALL MEET THEIR DOOM.
—PATHOS VERDES III
CHIEF ARCHITECT AND
LOYAL
SUBJECT OF THE GODS
Kratos scowled as he read the graven words. The Architect had actually designed the Temple of Pandora, deliberately, to be solved by “the bravest hero”? Kratos snorted in disgust. He was no hero, having committed the bloody murders he had, but he would not meet his doom here. His hatred for Ares—and the promise of the gods to erase his nightmares—would carry him to victory. Kratos spun about when the great temple doors slammed behind him. There was no going back, even if he had wanted to.
He looked around and saw that the only way forward was through a portal carved with more of the curious symbols. At cardinal points around the circular doorway were large gemstones, dull and lifeless in spite of the sunlight slanting down from behind him. Kratos placed a hand on one huge stone that might have been a diamond. He felt it quiver and drew back his hand.
Spinning, drawing the Blades of Chaos, he faced a ten-foot-tall heavily armored undead. Kratos crossed his blades above his head to fend off a powerful downward strike by the undead’s massive sword. The blow was so hard that it drove Kratos to his knees.
Rather than force his way back to his feet, Kratos suddenly released the pressure on his blades and rolled forward between the undead’s legs. As he whirled under, he knocked it down by grabbing its skeletal ankles. The undead soldier toppled forward, giving Kratos the opening he needed. He came to his feet and slashed with all his strength. Two things happened, one expected and the other surprising. The undead’s head exploded from its neck, as he’d intended.
The diamond Kratos had touched on the doorway began to glow. He stepped over his fallen adversary and pressed his callused hand to the now-illuminated, flame-hot diamond. He reached up and brushed his hand over the next jewel, still coldly inert.
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