IT WAS TOO MUCH to expect that he would not be noticed by Ares’s marauding horde. He got to his feet and faced a half dozen Minotaurs. Still weak and shaking from his excursion through the Cyclops’s gut, knowing his physical prowess was inadequate for this fight, Kratos reached back over his shoulder with his left hand. In desperation, he again found the serpent hair of Medusa’s head materializing in his grasp. He brought the Gorgon’s head whipping forward, its eyes ablaze with emerald fire. The Minotaurs averted their eyes.
Kratos sprang straight up to kick the nearest Minotaur behind the ear, which knocked its head forward with such force that one of its horns gored the monster next to him. Kratos left them to sort that out for themselves. He landed in a roll that brought him to a crouch by another’s ankle. He grabbed the beast’s hoof with both hands and yanked it from its feet. If he had been able to recover his full strength, he could have broken its legs. Instead, the Minotaur slammed to earth with a painful-sounding thump-but a little bit of pain was a great deal less than Kratos had intended.
He stood and dragged the Minotaur with him, getting it in a headlock. Putting his entire body into the move, Kratos twisted so hard he broke the creature’s neck. The other Minotaurs began to regroup, sure now that Kratos could not use his magic against them successfully. They looked sideways at him, ready to avert their heads if he produced Medusa’s head once more. For Kratos, that was magic better forgotten in favor of the sword.
He reached for the Blades of Chaos as the Minotaurs backed away.
“Cowards,” he snarled. Then he realized the battle was joined by undead infantry with javelins.
Needle-pointed steel rained around him. His only escape lay within the building and the trapdoor that the unfortunate woman had been shouting about.
Dripping blood, he backed into the archway of the inn the woman had indicated. To retreat burned him like white-hot iron-but this was not retreat. He was pressing on to complete his mission, to find the Oracle and learn her secret. He kicked the door shut with his heel as he entered, then barred it. Instantly the door began to splinter under repeated blows of the Minotaurs’ enormous axes, and a javelin whistled through a window to embed in a table a few feet away.
The stone-and-mortar hearth still crackled with cheery flame. If the javelin-impaled table and the sounds from outside could have been ignored, this would have been a pleasant spot to while away an hour or two. A quick scan around the room showed Kratos that this had indeed been some sort of inn, confirmed by multiple representations of Zeus shown with wide and welcoming arms on the walls. There was even a statue of the King of Olympus set behind an altar beyond the hearth. This statue, like the frescoes around the room, had arms widespread in welcome. The woman had spoken of a trapdoor, though none was evident, nor were there rugs or floor tiles that might conceal such an exit.
Kratos squinted at the hearth. This building had been sanctified to Zeus Philoxenos, the grantor of hospitality; could another part of the structure have been similarly sanctified to Zeus Katachthonios, Zeus the kindly protector underground?
Kratos released the Blades of Chaos and bent to examine the hearth. As was common in hostelries, the hearth had been constructed in a ring of stone and mortar in the middle of the room, set upon a slab of limestone thick enough to keep the heat from the hearth from endangering the wood-plank floor. Neither the hearth nor the slab beneath it showed any sign of being willing to move-whether to slide aside, or lift, or fall-despite Kratos’s best efforts.
The chopping and hammering of axes against the heavy door suddenly doubled in speed and impact. The orange glow from fires outside began to glimmer through splintery holes, and Kratos knew he had only seconds to either uncover the trapdoor, or prepare to make a stand.
Kratos looked again about the room, muttering through his teeth, “Zeus… Zeus… show me your wisdom!”
“I am with you, Kratos.”
Kratos’s head jerked up and he spun around. Had that been a voice in his ears or only in his mind? He did not take time to ask or investigate further, for he now noticed a detail of the huge statue that previously had escaped his hasty scan.
Chains dangled from the statue’s wrists-chains very much like Kratos’s own. Now Kratos saw the smoothly finished cracks where wide and welcoming arms joined the god’s mighty shoulders, as though these shoulders might have joints not unlike those of a man.
Kratos leaped to the top of the altar and sprang again. He caught one chain and swung across the statue’s front to grab the other, then bunched the knotted muscles of his arms and his back to pull both chains simultaneously. He understood then why the woman had not taken her infant down through the trapdoor. These arms could not have been moved without three or four men using the chains to pull each one.
Three or four men-or one Ghost of Sparta.
The arms swiveled down so that the welcoming hands came together, palms up, fingers pointing at the hearth behind Kratos-the hearth that now had lifted straight up from the floor. Supported by heavy vertical timbers, it revealed a dark opening below.
From the continuing tension on the chains he held, Kratos knew the hearth door would slam shut as soon as he let go, but Kratos had outsmarted similar devices in the past. He braced his feet against the thighs of the marble Zeus and strained outward with all his might. In the instant that he released the chains, he drove out into a hurtling dive as the hearth slab crashed down like a boulder from a cliff. He went headfirst into the hole, the falling slab barely clipping the heels of his sandals.
He landed hard on damp stone in the blackness and cast a wary glance at the slab above. Not the faintest glimmer of light showed through any crack. Unless the Minotaurs were a great deal smarter than he gave them credit for, or more driven to find him than was likely, they’d never figure out how he had escaped.
But that didn’t mean he had time to waste congratulating himself. The Oracle still waited.
Kratos stood, then fell to his knees as dizziness assailed him. His lungs burned anew, and his blistered back again delivered constant pain. He needed time to heal, to mend his wounds and There would be no time to pause. Above, he heard the chipping of axes against Zeus’s statue. The Minotaurs might be unable to open the way into the underground passage, but they had somehow figured out where he had gone and worked to follow as best they could by destroying the statue.
Kratos brushed his hand over his face, then laughed harshly. The Minotaurs did not need to be smart to follow him. All they needed to do was follow the trail of the Cyclops’s blood he’d left behind. He was still covered in gore. His footsteps had led the Minotaurs to the statue of Zeus. His bloody handprints on the chains showed what he had done to escape. They would be after him in scant minutes.
He tried to stand, but his legs failed him. He sat again, still panting from exertion-from exhaustion.
Welling up from deep within the hard core that was his heart came resolve. He was Spartan. Ares had used him.
Kratos screamed as the visions rushed back to him. The temple. The old woman and those within… the woman and child within… and he had With a mighty surge, Kratos got to his feet, using the wall as support. He closed his eyes and turned slowly in the darkness until he felt a faint puff of air against his face. Without opening his eyes, he walked hesitantly into that air current. Only after he had gone several dozen paces without bumping into a wall did he bother to open his eyes. Vision now dark-adapted, he quickly spotted a tiny glow at the far end of a narrow, low tunnel.
He walked steadily toward the light, wary of a trap along the way. If he had been the builder of this escape tunnel, he would have dug a pit to cause the unwary intruder to break a leg. If the builder had been more ambitious, there might be trip wires, swinging hammers, or other perils that the innkeepers and guests would know to avoid, leaving unpleasant surprises for any pursuers. The light grew brighter, bigger, more inviting, and he’d encountered no traps. He walked faster.