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?
TWENTY-SIX
“YOU CHOSE WELL, my daughter,” Zeus said, as together they watched the scrying pool display the slow descent of the Architect’s throne pillar.
“Ares chose, I refined,” Athena said, unwilling to take her eyes from the image of Kratos until the Spartan and Pandora’s Box reached the entrance level of the temple. “My brother did not understand what he had in Kratos.”
“And so he blunted his best weapon.”
“A weapon that is now deadlier than Ares could ever have forged,” Athena said. They watched the progress of her mortal as he looked around the temple atop the mountain behind Athens. “A question, my lord. Is this the result of your planning?”
He turned from her to point.
“Father…” she began again, but the King of Olympus simply nodded toward the scrying pool, where the throne pillar still descended on its steady pace through the innumerable floors of the temple.
“Your Spartan has nearly reached the temple’s antechamber,” he said. “Is there anything you want to tell him before he goes outside?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Once he brings the box out of the temple, events might begin to unfold swiftly.”
Athena saw that the descending pillar had now reached the antechamber itself, extending downward through the ceiling until it broke through the floor below and continued to sink. The earthquakes this triggered began to shake the whole temple, as well as the mountains above and below it. Chunks of masonry burst outward from the mechanical stresses, and boulders began to rain down upon Cronos’s head.
She willed herself from Olympus to the antechamber of the Temple of Pandora, where she stood, waiting invisibly, while the throne pillar ground its way down to reveal Kratos and Pandora’s Box.
The Spartan appeared unusually pensive as he put his shoulder to the box and began to shove it toward the immense outer doors of the temple. At his touch, a great spray of crackling energy erupted from the giant gemstones.
Athena gathered the sizzling lightning into a semblance of her face. “Kratos, your quest is at an end. You are the first mortal to ever reach Pandora’s Box. There is still time to save Athens. You must bring the box back to my city and use it to kill Ares.”
Kratos lifted his eyes to meet hers, and she noted how meeting the challenges required to free Pandora’s Box had changed him. Bloodlust had been tempered with thoughtfulness. Mercy was beyond his pale, but he had been forged into a more potent weapon, one that would surprise Ares. “Return to Athens, Kratos,” she said. “Return and save my city.”
As she willed herself back to Olympus, Athena heard Kratos’s grunt as he began pushing the ponderous box.
She rematerialized before the throne of Zeus.
Zeus, to her surprise, was still there, still watching the scrying pool. “He’s opening the doors. Watch,” he said, “here it comes.”
“Father, I must transport Kratos and Pandora’s Box back to-”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“But, Father, even to lower the box from Cronos’s back-”
“I said,” Zeus snapped, “don’t worry about it.”
“With every passing second, more of my city burns!”
Zeus gestured down at the images in the reflecting pool. “Watch.”
As Kratos pushed Pandora’s Box out from the temple into the morning sun of the Desert of Lost Souls for the first time in a thousand years…
Zeus gestured, and the scene in the pool changed.
Athens lay in flames. Ares strode through the streets, stamping fleeing Athenians, laughing as his sword slashed whole neighborhoods to rubble and hammer blows squashed houses flat. His evil laughter echoed from the mountains to the harbor.
As the God of War lifted a fist to smash another building, he paused, fist upraised, and turned to the east as though an invisible hand had tapped him on the shoulder.
“So, little Spartan, you’ve recovered Zeus’s precious box.” The flames of Ares’s hair blazed like the sun. His eyes burned with a fury not to be contained, and his entire body shook as anger fed his muscles. “You will not live to see it opened!”
Ares reached down to snap off one of the great marble columns of the Parthenon. The god hefted it as though the column were no more than a child’s toy spear but one with a deadly, jagged point. He ran four ground-shaking steps and hurled his prodigious javelin, which streaked upward into the sky so fast it vanished with a thunderclap.
Ares turned back to his task of destruction, a sneer on his face. He did not even bother to watch his weapon strike.
“Good-bye, Spartan. You will rot in the depths of Hades for all eternity.”
His laughter pealed over the ruins of Athens like the doom horn of Hades himself.
“Father, stop him-”
“Athena,” Zeus interrupted sharply, “your plans are at an end. There is only one more thing for you to do until this is all over.”
Athena lowered her head, worrying about Kratos’s fate and that of her city. “And what is that, Father?”
“Watch.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
KRATOS’S FEET KEPT SLIPPING. He moved closer to Pandora’s Box, got his legs under him, and pushed harder. The monstrous box moved slowly. Weighing an imponderable amount, the box proved difficult to slide even across the polished floor of the antechamber. The earthquakes caused him to lose what little traction he found under his sandals. Even as he finally shoved the box through the titanic doors, more masonry tumbled and shattered around him.
With the box in the doorway, Kratos stopped to gather his strength for one last hard shove and found himself gazing up at the beauty of the desert sky: vivid cerulean, shading toward indigo in the west, studded with clouds that took on curious shapes that chilled his soul.
But there was more up there than clouds. Four specks drifted high in the sky, slipping in and out of feathery clouds only to reappear as dark, almost invisible dots warning of approaching danger. Harpies!
&n
bsp; His attention returned to Pandora’s Box. He had no idea how he’d lower it from Cronos’s back, let alone drag it across the Desert of Lost Souls. He reached up and gripped the lid. No matter how hard he shoved, the lid refused to budge. Taking the entire box back to Athens would be easier if he possessed whatever power lay locked within. While it might not grant him the ability to move this massive box from Pandora’s temple all the way to Athens, he guessed it would make the task easier.
He tried to slide the lid, lift it, swing it to the side, but whatever force locked this box was more than he could overcome. Perhaps it could only be opened after he took it to Athens, or the box might have to be placed in Athena’s temple, where her oracle could use it to bestow the power upon him. Kratos wished he knew more, but he didn’t have the time to waste in speculation.
He started pushing again. Getting out of Pandora’s temple had to be his first goal. When finally he had shoved the box fully outside, the massive doors of the temple boomed shut behind him. He stopped to catch his breath and to choose a path. He squinted at the sky and the harpies on their way down.
And one of those low clouds suddenly developed a large hole in the middle, as if Zeus had shoved his finger through it. A ripple spread outward from the hole, like the ripples from a stone tossed in a still pool. Kratos’s scowl deepened.
With only an instant’s flash of white, his chest was struck by an invisible hammer, wielded by an invisible Titan. Nothing in all his decades of battle had ever hit him so hard. The impact blasted him backward off his feet and drove him flying into the vast stone door of the Temple of Pandora.
Pinned to the stone door, blinking his incomprehension at the immense white marble column sticking out of his chest, Kratos fought to breathe. The spear of marble had struck so fast, he never saw it until he was already hit. He looked down and knew he had only seconds of life remaining in his rapidly failing body. He could not speak, for his lungs had been punched from his chest along with his heart and liver, stomach and spleen. Weakly, he scrabbled at the column. He knew that only the last drops of blood in his brain gave him awareness in these final seconds…
And even in death, the nightmares would not leave him.
He again saw his career, his life as a man and as a weapon in the hands of the war god. He saw his victories beyond number, murders beyond all imagination, but two murders he didn’t have to imagine. He remembered them.
He saw them every night in his dreams.
He saw the ancient, wizened village oracle and again heard her words: “Beware of blaspheming ’gainst the goddess, Kratos! Do not enter this place!”
If only he’d had the wisdom to heed her words…
And the massacre in the village temple replayed in his mind once more as it had every night for ten long years: the murder of the priests, the slaughter of Athena’s worshippers huddled there, and then the final two, a woman and a girl, only silhouettes against the fires he had set to burn the temple and every building in the village… those last two silhouettes, who didn’t fall to their knees, didn’t try to run away, didn’t beg or plead for their lives…
Kratos again felt his blades sear through their flesh, and he knew when their souls fled, sent to Hades as he had done to so many others. He had killed too many for too long not to be an efficient soldier. Too efficient.
His final two victims had not fallen to their knees, had not tried to flee, did not beg or plead for their lives because Kratos’s wife and his daughter could not believe that their husband and father would ever hurt them.
Kratos again felt himself fall to his knees, and then it was he who begged, who pleaded, who wished he could flee what he found there. Once more he was haunted by the sight of his beloved wife, his precious daughter, lying in pools of their own blood, slaughtered like lambs by his own hand.
“My wife… my child… how?” The words had choked him-a final, fatal question that he asked of no one, because he was the only living creature within that burning temple. “They were left safe in Sparta… .”
The flames of the temple had answered him-in the voice of his master.
“You are becoming all I’d hoped you’d be, Kratos. Now, with your wife and child dead, nothing will hold you back. You will become even stronger. You will become DEATH ITSELF!”
On that night, Kratos realized his true enemy was the god he had served all too faithfully. Upon the cold bodies of the only two people on earth he had ever loved, Kratos swore a terrible oath. He would not rest until the God of War was destroyed.
The ancient village witch, Athena’s oracle in that tiny village, had come upon him as he stood by the pyre on which he burned the bodies of his beloved wife and his precious daughter. For only a moment, her senile cackle had transformed into words clear and strong, in a voice from the gods themselves.
“From this night forward, the mark of your terrible deed will be visible to all. The ashes of your wife and child will remain fastened to your skin, never to be removed.”
As the ashes had arisen from their resting place and painted themselves upon his skin forever, Kratos was able only to stand, to swallow his grief, and to accept the doom the gods had pronounced upon him. With that curse, all would know him for the beast he had become.
His skin white with the ash of his dead family, the Ghost of Sparta was born.
But he had never dreamed he would come so close-he had never dreamed he would die in the Desert of Lost Souls, Pandora’s Box itself the last sight his failing eyes would ever behold…
As the darkness of death closed down his vision, the four harpies flapped down from the sky, seized the box in their talons, and lifted away again.
West.
Toward Athens.
Knowing how completely he had failed, he could no longer hold on to life. With one last convulsive shudder, Kratos died.
But for the Ghost of Sparta, even death was not the end.
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 e
nough 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.”
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