Kratos stepped closer and stared into the fire, where bodies sizzled and popped.
“I see your question. How many bodies a day do I burn? Go on. You can ask. I tried counting, for the first few years, that is. I gave up after the tenth year. Five a day? A dozen? I know your questions, I do, since I’ve heard ’em all before. Did every one slay desert Sirens and sound the horn to get here? Did I?”
Kratos grunted, looked past the remnant of a man, and studied the gates for a way to open them. If he could not, he might scale the walls beside the bronze-and-wood gates. But he recognized the danger in that, with the harpies fluttering around above, eyeing him hungrily.
“You shouldn’t think so much,” the firekeeper said. “It’ll only make you crazy-but then, you’re here, so you must already be crazy.” The way it laughed warned Kratos of something more. “You’re right to question me. I know what happened to you because you didn’t question the gods.”
A fist of dread clenched in Kratos’s guts. He fixed his gaze on the firekeeper.
“I know you are the Ghost of Sparta.” The empty eye socket glimmered as though the undead stared at him intently. “I know why your skin is white as ash.”
Kratos lurched forward and seized the firekeeper by the throat. “Your job is difficult for a creature missing a hand and a foot. Imagine how difficult it will be when you’re missing your head.”
“You’ll have no luck entering the temple if that gate stays closed.” Kratos’s grip didn’t impede the creature’s mocking speech. “Think it over, Ghost of Sparta. Can you risk mindlessly serving your lust for blood? After what happened last time?”
With a wordless snarl of frustration, Kratos cast the firekeeper to the ground. Chuckling, the creature rose and hopped over to grab a skull from the ground. With speed and accuracy astonishing for such a broken creature, the firekeeper hurled the skull at an outcropping above. It shattered against the stone, its impact disturbing a pair of harpies. They fluttered down toward some sort of mechanism at the top of the massive gate. Kratos could not see what they did, but soon the gate began to lift slowly, as one harpy on each side flapped frantically to lift with all her might. The gates ratcheted upward and locked in place. “See you soon, Ghost of Sparta!” the firekeeper cried. “I’ll see you again when the harpies drop you in my bowl!”
Kratos strode through the gate without a backward glance.
SEVENTEEN
THE BOOK LAY OPEN before a massive door like the eye of a god, its upper arch decorated with arcane symbols. The book itself seemed to be only a statue, a replica, carved from stone to look like a book on a pedestal-no real book could have survived exposure to the Desert of Lost Souls, open for a thousand years.
Its nature was irrelevant. All the import was conveyed by the words graven into its stone pages.
– PATHOS VERDES III
Kratos scowled as he read the graven words. The Architect had actually designed the Temple of Pandora, deliberately, to be solved by “the bravest hero”? Kratos snorted in disgust. He was no hero, having committed the bloody murders he had, but he would not meet his doom here. His hatred for Ares-and the promise of the gods to erase his nightmares-would carry him to victory. Kratos spun about when the great temple doors slammed behind him. There was no going back, even if he had wanted to.
He looked around and saw that the only way forward was through a portal carved with more of the curious symbols. At cardinal points around the circular doorway were large gemstones, dull and lifeless in spite of the sunlight slanting down from behind him. Kratos placed a hand on one huge stone that might have been a diamond. He felt it quiver and drew back his hand.
Spinning, drawing the Blades of Chaos, he faced a ten-foot-tall heavily armored undead. Kratos crossed his blades above his head to fend off a powerful downward strike by the undead’s massive sword. The blow was so hard that it drove Kratos to his knees.
Rather than force his way back to his feet, Kratos suddenly released the pressure on his blades and rolled forward between the undead’s legs. As he whirled under, he knocked it down by grabbing its skeletal ankles. The undead soldier toppled forward, giving Kratos the opening he needed. He came to his feet and slashed with all his strength. Two things happened, one expected and the other surprising. The undead’s head exploded from its neck, as he’d intended.
The diamond Kratos had touched on the doorway began to glow. He stepped over his fallen adversary and pressed his callused hand to the now-illuminated, flame-hot diamond. He reached up and brushed his hand over the next jewel, still coldly inert.
He quickly found himself engaged with a Cyclops that materialized behind him. The fight was fierce, but Kratos dispatched the one-eyed horror with a feint to the leg that caused the Cyclops to bend low. The blade in Kratos’s left hand speared deep through the single orb, causing eye goo and brains to gush out.
The stone in the door now glowed a bright ruby red.
“So,” Kratos said, smiling grimly. “This is the key to your doorway, Architect. Blood!” He quickly touched the remaining two gems, producing two fighters. Knowing the secret of the portal allowed him to waste no effort sending the monsters to Hades where they belonged.
The two remaining gems-one peridot, gleaming greenish-yellow, and the other a blazing sapphire blue-sent lightning arcing around the circular portal. Slowly, the doorway into the Temple of Pandora opened to him.
Kratos entered a long, curving corridor lined with doors on both sides.
Here, too, wall-mounted braziers burned with cheery flame. They could be magical-apparently everything here was, to some degree or other-but they certainly wouldn’t have been the work of the Architect; there was absolutely no reason to illuminate the interior if one wanted to keep intruders out. Everything would be doubly challenging in the kind of inky blackness the stone-shrouded interior would otherwise be-and anyone attempting to reach Pandora’s Box would have to do it before his lamp oil ran out.
Then Kratos laughed harshly. The Architect undoubtedly thought the sight of the monsters awaiting anyone who had come into this maze would unnerve them, add to their fear, make their deaths all the more certain, as terror froze their arms and loosened their bowels. The Temple of Pandora was not only about keeping out those who sought the box. It would be designed to inspire gut-churning fear in those who dared come this far. More than once, Ares had told Kratos that the purpose of war was not to kill your enemy but to kill him after breaking his spirit.
He looked to either side, calculating the curve. If this corridor formed a ring, it would be very large. His first order of business was to investigate the lay of the land, because apparently any part of this structure could, without warning, become a battlefield. He trotted around the circle… and when he returned to his starting point, he discovered that the great circular door through which he had entered had closed, sealed to his best effort to open it again.
Kratos ignored this. Retreat was not in his fiber. Win or die. The way it always had been.
He found an open archway as he continued around the ring-one that hadn’t been open a moment ago, when he’d first passed. The view along the hallway open before him looked promising-every few yards, giant spiked walls slammed against one another with enough force to shake the stone floor on which he stood. Reasoning that the Architect had gone to so much trouble to discourage intruders along this particular path made it a likely place to start his quest.