Up from the dark waters struck a serpent whose head was larger than Kratos’s fist. Its fangs flashed as it struck. The venom dripping from their needle tips smoked in the gloom and caused the water where it fell to boil. Kratos blocked the strike with one blade while he struck back with the other. The snake’s head and a span of its neck flipped through the air. Its body thrashed wildly as it died, but the head continued to snap at him, its black eyes glaring with malice. Kratos pressed both blade tips into the head and waited for the viciousness to fade and die. Eventually, it did.
He looked up in time to see more ripples approaching: snakes swimming just under the murky surface, too many for him to avoid. One caught him, its fangs driving hard into his greaves, chewing as though it thought to drive its fangs through the heavy bronze. Kratos didn’t wait to find out if it was right. The pommel of a blade crushed a fragile skull. The fangs and jawbone remained clamped on his greave. The water ahead boiled as more snakes swarmed toward him, too many to count. Kratos slashed repeatedly down into the water in front of him, a blinding flourish that turned the blades into a shield of death. He drove grimly forward until he reached the juncture again. The water churned crimson with the snakes’ blood. And then the water calmed.
The dripping of moisture off the walls was all he could hear.
Kratos looked into the water and saw movement, but not of snakes. He lifted his foot and brought it down, thinking to crush any creature just below the surface. He felt his foot slide into the outline of a boot cut into the stone. Curious, he scooted his other sandaled foot about and found a corresponding indentation. For a moment he stood with both feet in the underwater impressions. As he started to step forward, he felt a tiny vibration that built and passed upward until it shook the chains embedded in his wrists.
Kratos saw the phosphorescent moss writhing on the walls. He lifted one foot from its indentation and the moss stopped glowing. Replacing his foot caused the moss to glow once more.
Curious, he reached out to touch the moss. Like a snake, it writhed sinuously away from his fingers. He growled deep in his throat. It was the only sound save the slow drip of moisture.
Stabbing out with his finger, he forced the animated moss to go around his digit. It spun about, encircling the spot on the stone wall where he pressed, as if the moss showed him an exit from an otherwise featureless tunnel. Leaning slightly, he applied pressure. Nothing happened.
He stepped from the outlines under his feet, and the moss ceased glowing. Kratos stomped to the end of the tunnel and found only another blank wall. Extensive investigation proved to him that there was no exit from the subterranean tunnels-none that he could find. He reached for both of the Blades of Chaos, then stopped.
“Two hands. There might be something in using two hands.” He returned to the indentations, slipped his feet into them, and moved his finger around on the right wall until the moss once more circled one specific spot. He pressed. Nothing.
Reaching to the other wall and repeating the movement produced another curlicue of green-glowing moss. This time, he moved his finger about and found a spot much higher on that wall before the moss stopped writhing and presented him with a specific spot.
Kratos pressed outward, fingers probing each of the marked spots.
“Mighty Zeus,” he whispered. His eyes went wide when a portion of the ceiling began to descend. Rather than jump back to defend himself, he stood his ground until the trapdoor had opened and lowered, giving him a ladder leading upward. Moving his fingers from the spots and stepping quickly, he reached the ladder just as it began to retreat aloft. Hanging on, he let the closing trapdoor carry him upward into a room whose floor was a foot above a sluggishly flowing stream. A channel of tightly placed stones held the stream in place. He shook himself dry. The snake with its fangs buried in his greaves came free when he scraped down his shin armor with the edge of his blade. He had not even realized it still clung to him with such tenacity.
These poisonous water snakes were nothing compared with the prey he sought. Not only must he face a monster who would turn him to stone if he so much as glanced at her face, he had to find one Gorgon in particular. Queen Medusa ruled her sisters, but unless she wore a crown or carried a scepter, Kratos had no simple way of picking her out from the rest.
Sandals scraped against stone as someone approached along the dry tunnel ahead. He raised the blades, but some primitive instinct warned him not to fight. Wit, for once, might bring victory, just as he had discovered the secret way into this lair. Kratos backed off and tucked himself from ankle to neck into a shallow stony niche lined with empty shelves. Other such niches pocked the chamber’s walls, but most of those had shelves stocked with objects. It seemed a fair guess that whoever came would fetch the items in storage and thus not even bother to look at a niche they knew to be empty.
And if he was wrong, he still had the blades. They would find this particular cabinet fully stocked with swift and bloody death.
Two men entered. One, a crookback, led the other, an old man who wore a filthy rag tied across his eyes. They began selecting items from nooks and crannies. The crookback laded the blind man with two boxes for every one of his own.
“My back is breaking from the load,” the crookback complained. “Carry another for me, will you?”
“I can hardly stand, Jurr, but go and pile it on. We daren’t make two trips. We cannot be late or Queen Medusa will punish us both.”
“Again,” Jurr said. “Once a day is more than I can bear. My back festers from the beatings she gives me.” He stacked several more heavy boxes onto the other’s considerable load while keeping only a pair of light ones for himself.
Kratos watched as they left, the blind man crushed by his load while the crookback showed a sprightlier stride. Kratos cared nothing for this. Clearly there were two sorts of people in this underground maze: those who did all the work, and those who could see. Being one of the latter made Kratos disinclined to disrupt the arrangement.
The only sound Kratos made when he followed was the faint squish of water squeezing from his sandals. As he went, he scratched trail markers in the luminescent moss. If he succeeded, he might have to find his own way out of here. Maybe Aphrodite would just snatch him back to Athens, but maybe he was required to return to where she had deposited him originally. He had never lost by preparing against betrayal.
Especially by gods.
“BRING MY MEAL, you disgusting vermin!”
This was a new voice, coming from a chamber ahead, where a lamp held back the gloom. Kratos stopped and pressed himself into the shadows outside the archway. Though the voice had been low and rough, like rocks being shaken in a brass jug, he caught some hint of inflection that told him the speaker might be female.
If he was right, a careless glance would doom him to an eternity as a stone statue, taunted by Gorgons in this twilight perdition.
The sighted man, Jurr, replied, “At once, Lady Medusa. I have brought the supplies.”
“You?” the blind man began. “I brought the-”
“Shh.”
“Shut your vile human mouths and get to work! My sisters and I grow hungrier by the moment. And angrier.” Her voice took on a dangerous edge. “It puts me in the mood for punishment.”
“Ohhh,” the blind man whined under his breath. “Oh, Zeus strike me dead before she touches me once more!”
“At least you can’t see, you lucky bastard,” Jurr snarled back just as softly. “Those mirrors, those accursed mirrors in her bedroom! Every way she turns, she can see her hideous self.”