“AND IF THAT WERE TRUE,” rumbled the god who now held him pinned in the arena, “you would still be the Fist of Ares on earth, and the world would still quake at the merest rumor of Sparta marching out to war. It was because you did not love me enough, Kratos. Because your heart still held close your-”
“No…” Kratos croaked out with the last of his voice. “No…”
The visions took him wholly now: He saw himself on the very last night he had served the God of War.
“THE VILLAGERS PRESUME to kneel first before Athena! Before Athena! This place is an affront to Ares! Burn it to the ground!”
Kratos grabbed a torch and sent it spinning through the night to land atop a thatched roof. The tiny sparks became a fire and then the entire roof collapsed, devouring the hut in minutes.
With a battle cry, Kratos led his horde of savage murderers into the village. The few villagers coming out to defend their homes were armed with shovels and planting sticks, without hope of resistance against his battle-hardened warriors. Kratos strode through the melee, hacking and slashing, killing without effort, without even really noticing whom he might be slaying… until he came to the village temple.
The Temple of Athena. And the wizened, age-crabbed old witch of an oracle who thought to bar his passage…
A knot formed in his belly. The stench of burning meat combined with wood and thatch as house after house was reduced to cinders. The temple looked deserted. But some dark foreboding gave Kratos pause…
But…
It was a shrine to Athena. Its existence was the reason for this massacre. How could he leave it standing?
“Everyone out!” he shouted, rapping hard on the thick wood door with the pommel of his sword. When no one answered, he stepped back and used the Blades of Chaos to reduce the door to splinters. A small, hunched-over Nubian woman shuffled out. She wore a shining green gown marked with the letter omega on the front.
“Sacrilege,” she said, shaking her finger at him. “Beware of blaspheming ’gainst the goddess, Kratos! Do not enter this place!”
Kratos backhanded the old woman, knocking her to the ground. “Never presume to give a Spartan orders.”
He kicked open the door and rushed into the temple. Two priests came toward him. The Blades of Chaos flashed and delivered fiery death to both men. Kratos roared in rage when other supplicants in the temple stirred. He rushed forward, not needing to even see his victims as he cut left, right, left, and then plunged ahead. There was no thought of restraint, no need for caution; there was only blood and death and triumph, Kratos in his element… and so he did not heed the last of his victims, and he did not hesitate to slaughter the last two supplicants in the village temple: a woman, and her young daughter…
THE TERRIBLE SHOCK of what he had done shattered the vision and brought him back to the temple arena where the god now crushed out his life. But at that instant, miraculously, the weight on his back vanished. Ares had lifted his foot away and once more returned to the center of the huge arena.
“Come on, you contemptible nothing, you insane murderer! You wanted to fight-let’s fight!”
Kratos picked himself up from the floor and shook the fog out of his head. The foot that the god had lowered upon his back had been the same one he’d stabbed with Artemis’s sword. He saw clearly the gouge left in the stone by the magical blade as it had spiked down through godly flesh…
But that gouge in the floor was dry as the Desert of Lost Souls outside.
There was no blood.
Kratos looked at the wall behind him, at the smear of shadows he cast in the light of the ubiquitous braziers. He looked at the wall beyond Ares, where the god’s gargantuan form cast no shadows at all.
Ares wasn’t Ares. The god wasn’t real.
“I am real enough to break you, Spartan. You want to kill me? Come on and try, you miserable mortal!”
Kratos’s ribs still ached with the memory of the god’s sandal crushing him to the floor; blood still trickled from a gash on his skull where his skin had split under the impact of the flat of Ares’s blade. Though it seemed Kratos could not harm this Ares, the reverse clearly did not apply.
“Why do you wait? Do you realize now how hopeless it is to try to kill a god?”
Kratos did want to kill Ares. His lust for the god’s blood burned like sun fire in his veins. But this was not Ares. No wonder the god seemed to be reading his mind-t his phantasmal “god” was itself a product of his mind.
Like the barbarian king in his visions.
Like his nightmares of his wife and his daughter.
To destroy this phantom Ares, Kratos would have to be strong enough to prevail against his own mind-but if he had such strength, he would never have needed to take service under Athena in the first place. He would have been strong enough to conquer his nightmares-to banish the memories of his crime-on his own. But he didn’t have that strength. He knew it. For ten years he’d labored to silence the voices in his head, to blind the eye of his memory. This phantasmal Ares was a foe he could never defeat until he conquered himself.
Kratos backed away.
TWENTY-FIVE
AS DAWN CARESSED the eastern desert with her rose-red fingers, Kratos stood on the roof of a huge building atop a mountain-the mountain that grew from the midst of the Temple of Pandora, which itself was built up from the mountain chained to the back of the laboring Titan who bore it on his eternal crawl through the Desert of Lost Souls.
And in the first gleam of Helios’s chariot on the far horizon, three huge figures around him shone and shimmered: statues, hundreds of feet tall, of the Brother Kings. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades stood facing one another, and the hands of all three were extended to support a disk the size of a marching field with a hole in the middle, like a wagon wheel of the same material as the statues themselves. This material-some mystical substance more transparent than glass-reflected the glints and highlights thrown off by the statues’ curves. Below where the golden chariot had yet to touch, the Brother Kings were wholly invisible.
Kratos trotted toward them. Athena had said the box rested at the summit of the temple, and obviously nothing stood higher than these. But when he reached them, their bases on the dawn-shadowed roof were not only invisible, they were insubstantial-as though the statues did not exist except in the light of dawn.
Kratos scowled upward at the images of the gods. His opportunity to reach the treasure they supported would last only as long as the dawn itself.
Zeus stood to the east, and so more of his statue was exposed to the dawn light. Kratos sprang to the figure of the King of Olympus and leaped high to see if he could touch the statue where the dawn struck it. At the top of his leap, he felt a surface warm and solid but more slippery than oiled glass. He drew one of the blades and leaped again to strike the statue. The only effect his blade could produce was to make the immense statue ring like a great crystal bell. Not so much as a scratch marred the nearly invisible surface.
But instead of fading like a sounding bell, this ring deepened and broadened, becoming louder and louder until Kratos had to clap hands over his ears against the growing pain. Poseidon’s statue was the next closest to the eastern edge of the roof. Kratos ran to it, steeling himself for the blast of sound he knew would come when he took his hands from his ears, then leaped into the dawn light and struck Poseidon, too, with a powerful blow from a Blade of Chaos.
The belling that rose was deeper, more resonant, and grew in power more swiftly than had the sound from Zeus. Farthest from the rise of dawn- appropriately enough, thought Kratos-stood Hades, King of the Underworld. And this note sparked by Kratos’s blow was darker and deeper still. The volume of their conjoined chord rose until it seemed to Kratos that there was nothing in the world except sound.