“You swear an oath that my woods will be sacrosanct?”
“Turn your creatures of the forest against Ares’s minions and my oath is made. I will see that all of Athens honors your bucolic temple,” Athena said, passion tingeing her words. “We must not allow him to trample the shrine you hold most sacred: the woods filled with creatures of hoof and wing.”
Artemis turned, drew another arrow from her quiver, and brought it to her string. She drew the bow back until it quivered with the strain. She loosed the arrow and it sang away, arching high into the air where it exploded with the fury of a new sun, rivaling anything her twin brother might place in the sky. The second sun rained down scintillant sparks.
Artemis said solemnly, “The army of Ares will find it impossible to pass through any forest where those under my protection roam.” With that, the Goddess of the Hunt spun and disappeared into the forest. In seconds the leaves had stopped quivering from her passage. She had become one with her domain again.
Athena counted this a partial victory. She had gained a potentally, but Athens-and, for that matter, Olympus itself-would never be safe while Ares lived. It was time to begin the next phase of her plan. Kratos must be trained. He must be tested. And most of all He must be properly armed.
FIVE
AS KRATOS TURNED the key he had struggled for so long to get, the mystical seal evaporated-and a soul-piercing scream came from the captain’s cabin. He kicked open the door, expecting to find what commanded such potent protections. In this, he was not disappointed. Kratos found treasure beyond turquoise and gold.
The three girls were as lovely as any he had ever seen. Or perhaps they simply looked lovely by comparison to the blackened, rotting faces of the undead that ripped at them with taloned hands.
Kratos froze for an instant, paralyzed by incomprehension. How had the undead gotten in here? Through the locked door? The only answer that made sense was his own culpability. By opening the door he had released more than the locking spell. He had also released the undead magically sealed in this room to protect against intruders. The captain must have known how to prevent their release. Kratos had blundered in and put the women in jeopardy.
In an instant, his confusion whirled away like leaves before a gale. Such imponderables were the stuff of idle hours. Right now he was still in a fight, as two of the rotting legionnaires rushed him, swinging wickedly hooked swords. Kratos reached back over his shoulder, and the same motion that drew the Blades of Chaos also bisected each undead from crown to crotch. He moved into the room and with his next swing severed the legs of an undead strangling one of the slave girls. The creature fell, dragging the girl with it to the floor, and went on strangling her as though Kratos had not mutilated its legs.
Kratos hacked off its arms and crushed its skull-but the severed hands only tightened, throttling the life from the woman. Snarling, he bent to rip away the clenched talons, but the girl’s head tilted at a crazy angle. Her neck had been snapped like a twig.
Another undead held a struggling woman in the air between itself and Kratos, making her a human shield.
“Steel works better,” Kratos sneered as he jammed a blade straight through her torso, encountering only the slight resistance of internal organs, and then the tip crunched hard into the undead holding her. He twisted the blade and they both fell limp.
“Don’t let it kill me. I beg you, don’t-” The third woman died as the undead drove a bony hand against her chest, crushing her throbbing heart within her breast. Her pleas trailed to wet, gurgling gasps as she collapsed. Two quick steps brought Kratos within striking distance. Delivering a single accurate cut, he dispatched the undead with the beating heart still clutched in its hand. The undead fell and lay sprawled, the heart pulsating, slowing to a shiver, then finally stopping, as dead as the girl from which it had been ripped.
Kratos stepped back. The carnage seemed to reel around him. He reached out to brace himself against the bulkhead, and still he nearly fell. “Stop,” he growled fiercely at himself; he had no more tolerance of his own weaknesses than he had of others. “These are not… are not
…”
The women’s deaths were no worse than he had seen thousands of times-no worse than he had done with his own hand, without the thinnest sliver of regret.
But the cabin faded as darkness settled around him and the visions began.
Blades slashing through necks, driving into exposed bellies. Screams of pain and the ghastly rattle of death. Heads exploding in a spray of blood. And the old woman waving her crooked hand, cackling like a damned thing.
“No,” Kratos cried. “No!”
Limbs severed. Fields of corpses, crows pecking at eyes staring sightlessly at a leaden sky, maggots eating dead flesh. The blood pooling around bodies on the temple floor-blood pooling around bodies-blood…
And still the demented laughter and the wave of the crooked hand…
“No!” With an effort of will that left him gasping, Kratos wrenched open his eyes. He was not in the temple; he did not face the shrill cackle of the village oracle! He was here, at the far end of ten years, standing in the captain’s quarters of a slave ship, and the slaughtered girls on the floor were not… were not “Athena!” Kratos spun about in a full circle, then fled from the cabin. “Athena!” He dashed to the hatchway leading to the deck. As he burst out onto the gore-soaked planking, he saw again the wooden statue of Athena that had graced his now-sunken ship. The statue stood at the prow of his new ship as she had on the old, impassive wooden eyes judging his every crime.
“Ten years, Athena! I have faithfully served the gods for ten years! When will you banish my nightmares? When? The visions haunt even my waking life!”
With a soft silvery shimmer like water in moonlight, the statue flickered to life. Those impassive wooden eyes now gleamed with the level gray stare of the goddess.
“We require one final task of you, Kratos. Your greatest challenge awaits-in Athens, where even now my brother Ares lays siege.”
Kratos stiffened as new visions assaulted his senses. He smelled fresh blood and raw meat, saw fire and destruction and fields piled with dead. He heard death cries, and he tasted the ash of burning corpses. Kratos forced his eyes shut, but he could not escape the vision. He shared every death with every murdered Athenian. He felt their shades- his shade-ripped screaming from his body, not by the clean stroke of sword or spear but by the gore-crusted talons of Ares’s monstrous minions.
“Athens is on the brink of destruction,” said the goddess through her statue. “ It is the will of Ares that my great city should fall.”
Kratos could only try to endure as ever darker, more gruesome visions assailed him.
“Zeus has forbidden the gods to wage war on one another.”
Kratos felt himself charred with imaginary flame, flesh boiled from his bones-what remained of him twisted into the air, riding a violent whirlwind until he witnessed the death of Athens as it might be seen by a soaring eagle. Then the vision released him, and he fell with shattering force back into his own body on the deck of the slave ship.
“That is why it must be you, Kratos. Only a mortal trained by a god has a chance of defeating Ares.”
“And if I am able to do this,” Kratos said, once more standing firmly upright, as a man should, “if I can kill the god, then the visions… they will end?”
“Complete this final task and the past that consumes you will be forgiven. Have faith, Kratos. The gods do not forget those who come to their aid.”
The statue’s eyes closed, and the shimmer of godhead faded.
Kratos stood motionless for a very long time, feeling a desperately unfamiliar sensation. He marveled at it, this feeling. He couldn’t recall the last time he had felt anything like it.