Kratos kicked harder, faster. Desperation drove him now. His arms turned cold, numb, bloodless. Both feet worked as if he were pummeling the beast with his fists. A chance kick caught the Hydra’s eye, causing the creature’s growl to become a roar of pain that released Kratos’s arms and sent him flipping upward, high into the air. As Kratos reached the top of his arc, the Hydra strained toward him, opening wide its maw to catch him like a casually tossed sweetmeat.
In a single instant, Kratos both feared and exulted.
As he fell, he returned the Blades of Chaos in one smooth motion to rest upon his back. He coiled himself into a tight ball and allowed the creature’s mouth to slam shut around him-but before it could swallow, he planted his feet against the Hydra’s lower jaw, braced his back against the slimy ridges of the vast hard palate above, and shoved.
The creature’s jaw began to open. Kratos strained like Hercules lifting the sky from the shoulders of Atlas. The Hydra strove with all its monstrous power to bite down again, but when the Ghost of Sparta stood braced, no power on earth could crush him.
Once he had forced his legs to full extension, Kratos wedged his hands in above his shoulders and continued to force open the Hydra’s mouth by strength of his mighty arms alone. A crack like the breaking of a main spar came from the hinge of the monster’s jaw, but Kratos did not relent and could not be denied. Fear was gone, replaced with cold triumph. With one great surge, he blasted his arms up straight above his head, and now the sound was not so much a crack as a crushing, grinding roar and a wet, leathery r-r-rip as the Hydra’s jaw shattered and its cheeks tore asunder.
The Hydra shuddered and released an ear-shattering bellow, and Kratos kicked himself free, leaping for the deck of the nearest ship. The endless neck and giant destroyed head slid back down into the Aegean’s dark waters, which now churned and boiled even more, as the voracious sharks circling below got a taste of the Hydra’s blood. The last Kratos saw, sharks were darting like crows into the Hydra’s mouth, ripping out gory chucks of its flapping tongue. To them it mattered not if the flesh they dined on was human or monster. Ravenously, they tore at the Hydra’s face, dragging it below the roiling surface.
Yet even that immense head was not enough for all the sharks. Hundreds-thousands!-circled endlessly, thrashing the sea with their tails as each hoped for its own meal.
Kratos would be happy to provide that for his unwitting allies. At his feet, his blood tinged the water that ran down his legs. Hooking a shark or two on the barbs of the Blades of Chaos would steal enough life to close these minor cuts. He seized the railing and pulled himself up the canted remnant of deck-but as he drew the blades, the circling sharks sped away. They had discovered a feast of their own.
Literally.
Everywhere he looked, sharks floated, their black eyes fixed and staring. Some were beginning to bloat and others had their entrails blown out, and even the sharks that swarmed these dead ones to strike their poisoned flesh soon were showing their own bellies to the sky.
Eating a Hydra was just as fatal as being eaten by one.
He took a moment to search the shattered hulk on which he stood, seeking a cask, a tub, anything that might have been watertight. Even an upturned bucket might have captured enough rainwater to slake his burning thirst, but there was not the tiniest drop to be found, either on the deck or in the one lower hold he could still reach. Then he saw the barrel near the rudder, water for the steersman. Kratos strode to it and thrust his head into the water to drink deeply.
He jerked back and spat, bile rising into his throat. Brackish water burned his mouth. He spat again, this time adding a curse.
“May the oceans turn to dust! It could taste no worse than this!”
But as these words left his lips, an eldritch light shimmered up from the invisible depths of the drowned hold in which he stood. Where before there had been only a stained and rotting bulkhead now stood an archway of alabaster and pearl, twice Kratos’s height and wider than he could span with his arms. That archway framed a vast face, bright as sun flash on a calm sea, the face of a man whose beard was sea foam and whose hair was braided with gleaming black kelp.
“Do you have so little regard for my domain, Kratos?” The tolerantly chiding voice boomed like a tidal surge blasting into a cave-pocked cliff. “Ten years have you sailed my seas on your quests, without shipwreck or storm founder-is that not evidence of my regard for you?”
“Lord Poseidon.” Kratos’s tone was respectful, but he did not bow his head. “How may I serve the King of the Ocean?”
“This Hydra that plagues my beautiful Aegean is a creature of your onetime master, Ares. Its existence is an insult. I would have you destroy it.”
“I plan to.”
“ Know that thus far you have but scratched this monstrosity-its secondary heads, such as those you’ve destroyed, are without number. The Hydra barely notices their loss.”
“Then how do I kill it?”
“You must destroy the master head-the one that holds the creature’s brain. The master head is ten times the size of the others, and its might is near to limitless.”
Kratos didn’t care about its might. “How do I find it?”
“I will take you there. And to help you in your task, I will lend you a tiny fraction of my own power.”
Kratos had a feeling that the sea god wouldn’t look kindly upon refusal. “What sort of power?”
“You know how my anger causes the earth to shake, and my fury spawns sea storms no ship can survive. Step forward into the archway where you see the image of my face, and I will grant you power beyond any you’ve ever known-you will command a fragment of my rage.”
Whatever Poseidon’s Rage might be, it couldn’t hurt any more than having the chains of the Blades of Chaos burned into his arms.
“All right,” he said. “Let us kill this beast.”
– -
STEPPING INTO THE ARCHWAY brought a blinding flash and the sensation of his bones being on fire, burning him from the inside out. Stepping out through the far side dropped Kratos into dank gloom that smelled of sweat and urine. The slow roll of the floor told him he was still aboard a ship. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could make out the shapes of what appeared to be cargo lashed into place on either side. From ahead, he heard a sobbing voice-a man, crying like a child, begging to be set free.
Kratos moved toward the mouth of the gangway in a battle-ready crouch. Screams came from above, and he suspected that the sea god had been as good as his word. Light gathered in an archway ahead, and as he approached it, he discovered that what had in the gloom appeared to be cargo was, in fact, people-people too sick or starved or thirsty to even move.
In the new light, Kratos saw the greenish gleam of bronze shackles on these people’s ankles, and he revised his own revision. These people were cargo.
It was a slave ship.
Kratos nodded to himself; slaves meant there would definitely be fresh water nearby-slaves were too valuable to be allowed to die of thirst. Some of them managed to rouse themselves enough to beg him for mercy as he passed. Kratos ignored them. Near the archway, a slave was bound in some kind of punishment position-his wrists were shackled together and hung from a short chain affixed to the ceiling. The chain was just long enough that his toes brushed the deck as the ship rolled. He sobbed in a thready, broken voice, “Please… please don’t leave me here… please…”
As Kratos moved toward him, the slave’s sobbing turned to screams. “By all the gods, I beg you… please!”
Kratos came to a stop beside him. “If I help, will you keep quiet?”
“Oh, bless you-all the gods bless you for a good and kind…” The slave’s voice trailed away as he finally managed to focus his eyes on his presumed rescuer. “You!” His voice was choked with awe. “The Ghost of Sparta-I know who you are! I know what you did! I’d rather die right here than be saved by you!”
Kratos drew one of the Blades of Chaos and, with a business
like flick of the wrist, slashed off the slave’s head. “Your prayer is granted.”
The slave had been so close to death already that the blade channeled only the faintest spark of life up the chains. Kratos glanced back into the slave hold, weighing the prospect of gaining more strength and healing himself by slaughtering them all-but they were so sickly that killing them would be more trouble than their lives were worth.
Kratos moved on. Beyond the slave hold stretched a broad companionway lined with doors. The screams from above were thinning already, and a chorus of thunderous roars that caused the whole ship to shiver warned him there was more than one Hydra head up there. Whoever was fighting them sounded as if they were losing. Kratos looked around for someone else to kill on his way up; he needed all the energy he could get.
The pair of doors near the end of the companionway were different from the others. Massively timbered and bound with black iron, they looked strong enough that even Kratos might have trouble breaking them down-and as he considered this, the blade chains began to warm, sparking with not-unpleasant stings. He drew one blade and pushed it toward the door before him. A brilliant shower of energy splashed over the door, and the blade never reached the timbers. The energy flickered longest around a deep slot in one timber-a lock. A magical lock.
Kratos nodded to himself. So: a pair of doors not only strong as a fortress but sealed with magical bindings and mystic locks and who knew what else. What sort of “treasures” might a slave ship’s captain keep within such a vault? Something beyond tawdry gold must be secure behind this door. Whatever it was, it might prove useful.
THE MAIN DECK LOOKED like a slaughterhouse where the butchery was still going on. Everywhere Kratos turned, sailors struggled with undead legionnaires or tried to fend off Hydra heads with long spears. Every timber on the ship was slick with blood, smeared with rotting undead flesh, or both. This stench-filled abattoir of screams and panic and desperation took him back to his younger days, to the raids on which he’d led his Spartan companions, in the long-ago time before he’d sworn himself to the service of Ares.
Of course, there hadn’t been quite so many undead soldiers back then. And the Hydra had been only a Spartan bedtime story-because even though Hercules was, through an accident of birth, merely Theban, he had also made himself a hero of Sparta by restoring its rightful king, Tyndareus.
Kratos moved out onto the deck, Blades of Chaos at the ready. The undead he simply ignored; the sailors would either handle them or provide enough diversion to keep them busy. Kratos had eyes only for the three heads of the Hydra that attacked this ship as a team.
The smaller heads to either side were still twice the size of any he had yet fought-and they were dwarfed by the inconceivable majesty of the master head. Rising on a sinuous neck higher than the ship’s mainmast, the master head was large enough to swallow the ship whole in a single gulp, and its eyes burned with a lurid yellow inner light. The secondary heads weaved and struck like vipers, keeping the spear-armed sailors at bay.
“Er-you a god?” The voice came from behind him. “Y’look kinda like a god. We could use a god.”
Kratos turned. Crouched behind a wheel coiled with anchor chain, a sailor peered at him through one good eye; his other was an empty socket bisected with a scar reminiscent of the one through Kratos’s eyebrow. The sailor’s remaining eye drifted about as though he couldn’t decide where to look.
“Your captain,” Kratos said. “Where is he?”
“Whatcha want with him anyways?”
“His surrender.” Kratos cast a scornful eye about the carnage on deck. “This is my ship now. How do you call it?”
“The Gods’ Lament,” came the answer. “You think you can take her?”
“I already have,” Kratos said. “It will be called Vengeance, and it is mine.”
“May the gods smile on that-if they don’t strike you down for hubris!”
Kratos squinted down at the sailor. Was the man mad? Who would dare to question the Ghost of Sparta to his face? Then he took in the sailor’s filthy tunic and the empty purple-stained wineskin on the deck beside him and realized that the man was too drunk to actually see him.
“Your captain,” Kratos repeated. “I won’t ask you again.”
The drunken sailor waved a trembling hand. “Over there. By the mast. The fella wi’ the big key round his neck. Y’see ’im?”
“The one on his knees?”
“Uh-huh. On his knees. Tha’s him.”
Kratos’s lip curled in scorn. “Begging for mercy?”
“Prrrrayin’,” the sailor corrected him. “Prayin’ to Poseidon… t’ save the ship from the Hydra…”
“His prayer has been answered.”
The sailor goggled up at him. “Y’re gonna save us?”
“No, I am going to save the ship.” As Kratos turned back to the fight, the vast master head dipped toward the base of the mainmast and snapped shut upon the kneeling captain. In an instant, the captain was gone-s wallowed alive-and his key with him. The master head reared up, unleashing a roar of triumph that blasted the ship’s sails to rags.
Kratos was undismayed. With a throat as long as the Hydra’s, swallowing could take a considerable length of time.
The three heads were too close together for him to engage them individually. If he went straight for the master head, he’d have to defend himself against attacks from both secondary heads. Going after either of the secondary heads would expose his rear or flank to the titanic jaws of the master. If he couldn’t take them one at a time, he’d kill them all at once.
He launched himself across the deck as if he’d been shot from a ballista.
The nearest head swept toward him as though to batter him right off the deck. Kratos overleaped the monster’s neck, slashing down with one of the blades. It chopped into bone and wedged itself at the joining of the skull and one horn; the chain snapped tight as a towline and yanked Kratos sideways into a whirl. He let the head’s swing wrap the chain all the way around its neck, leaving him standing on the top of its skull. Faster than thought, the other blade found his hand, then together they thrust deep into the head’s eyes. Accurate slashes painted the blade with a gooey mass of vitreous humor and sent the head reeling blindly.
A looming shadow gathered inky darkness around him. The master head arrowed downward like a falcon the size of a house. Kratos stood and waited. The vast jaws of the master head gaped far too wide to pluck him off the secondary head with any sort of accuracy-especially since the secondary head was still whipping from side to side, faster and faster as it tried to shake Kratos off-and so the master head did exactly as Kratos had anticipated.
Those gargantuan jaws closed around the entire secondary head, and teeth like the ram spike of a war galley chopped into the armored scales of the neck, trying to bite off the secondary head and swallow it-and Kratos-whole.
But Kratos knew well how tough the scaly hide of the Hydra truly was. There was ample time for him to slip between the great teeth as the master head bit down and began to shake his head like a wolf worrying off the haunch of a deer. Kratos jammed one of the blades into the master’s lower gums, then used the chain to swing himself under the creature’s chin. There, he hacked into the scales with the second blade, while ripping the first one free. The master head roared at the sudden pain, releasing the half-chewed secondary head to collapse back into the sea.
Kratos went on hacking into its neck close under its chin, where the creature couldn’t get at him. The remaining secondary head snaked over to strike like a viper at Kratos’s back-but getting one of the Blades of Chaos up its nose made it rethink that strategy. With the jagged blade firmly lodged in the sinus cavity, pulling back made the creature unleash a screech of pain entirely unlike anything Kratos had ever heard. At this, the master head, instead of trying to bite Kratos in half, slammed its neck against the mainmast, crushing Kratos between its scales and the enormous spar.
Kratos’s vision darkened. Th
e master head held him there, leaning into him. The mainmast creaked alarmingly, as did Kratos’s spine-but the mast gave way first, snapping off with a splintering roar.
The master head reared up again, and the secondary head tried desperately to pull away, but the blade up its nose was lodged like a fishhook-pulling away only seated it all the deeper. The other blade was similarly set in the master head’s throat. Neither blade would rip free, and they could not be broken any more than the blade chains binding them to Kratos’s arms could be broken by any earthly force. So when the master head pulled one way and the secondary head pulled another, there was only one thing linking them that could be broken.
Kratos.
He screamed in agony as he hung suspended between the two heads trying to rip him in half. Muscles bunched in his massive shoulders, but even his preternatural strength was no match for the titanic power of the Hydra. On another day, Kratos would have died there-but the Hydra was a creature of Ares. And the prospect of being killed by a minion of his enemy fueled Kratos’s anger. More than anger. More than fury.
It filled him with the rage of a god.
And, just as when he’d entered the archway where he met Poseidon, he felt as if his bones were on fire, burning him from the inside out. Lightning blazed around him, causing the world to fade into a dim image of washed-out blue, and blasted along the chains to the blades. The flesh around the blade embedded in the master head’s neck exploded like a sealed pot left on the fire too long, scattering immense gobbets of smoking remains.
The blade lodged in the secondary head’s sinus cavity had an even more spectacular effect: When the inner membranes detonated, they blasted shards of bone out the Hydra’s eye sockets, which popped the creature’s sundered eyes from its face. Fragments penetrated whatever the secondary head used as a brain; the neck collapsed, and Kratos fell toward the deck far below.
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