“I can.” He thought he should really tell the ancient undead who tended the fires out front that he’d been right all along and that the insane Architect of the Temple of Pandora did still live, haunting his millennial masterpiece.
In his hands was the key to the final lock. Kratos saw no reason to hesitate.
“No! No no no PLEASE-”
Kratos jammed the undying head of the Architect face-first into the box. The pipe-and-reed voice below the dais screamed in panic and despair as the poisoned needles stabbed out from all four walls of the box and upward from below. They lodged in his face, in his neck, drove through his temples, and punctured his eyeballs as one might lance a boil. With his lips pinned to his teeth, even the Architect’s artificial voice could only moan and whimper without words.
The walls of the chamber groaned as they came alive to lower themselves around Kratos. An instant later, he realized that it was the dais of the throne where he stood that was instead lifting, becoming a rising pillar of stone that went up, and up, fitting perfectly through the hole left in the ceiling by the shattered window. Outside it rose still more, and more, lifting Kratos and the throne hundreds of feet into the air, until finally it thrust him up through the hole in the center of the enormous disk… and stopped.
Kratos stood for a moment, feeling the eyes of the Brother Kings upon him. Only a pace or two in front of him stood a vast chest, as tall as Kratos and thrice as wide, constructed of impossibly lustrous metalwork that surrounded golden jewels larger than his head.
And so: There it was. Pandora’s Box.
At last.
But Kratos felt no relief, no triumph, for this was not the end of his quest. It was only one more point along the way. The end of this story must lie in Athens.
He glanced upward and saw that the head of Zeus’s statue had vanished down to his eyebrows, dematerializing in the rising sun of day. As he watched, the cirrus clouds of Zeus’s eyebrows evaporated. And then so did the top of Poseidon’s head.
He sprang from the throne, raced across the transparent disk toward the enormous box, and discovered a new problem when he tried to come to a stop-he couldn’t. He slid right into the box with breathtaking impact, which also pushed the box a few paces farther from the throne pillar.
The mysterious substance was still more slippery than oiled glass.
Kratos looked around in desperation as he carefully circled to the far side of the box. Flames trapped within the sides blazed. The golden gems encrusting the top pulsed with energy. But none of this helped him. He’d never get enough purchase on this surface to push or pull something so massive. If only he had something to throw, perhaps he could knock it on its way… but what could he throw that would have enough heft to move the box?
It struck him then that the placement of the box on the disk would not have been an accident-it was almost halfway to the rim. And it rested exactly on the line between the throne pillar and the statue of Zeus, as though this final test had been designed specifically for him: Looking up at the vanishing statue of the Skyfather, Kratos realized that Zeus himself had given him the one and only possible way to move that enormous weight on this impossibly slick surface in so short a time.
He took a few careful paces toward the statue and inclined his head. “Lord Zeus. Did you foresee this moment? Is this why you granted me a fraction of your power?”
With no answer forthcoming, Kratos wheeled and reached back over his right shoulder to grasp the solid lightning of the thunderbolt. He took up a wide stance for balance and threw the thunderbolt at the disk just short of the box. The impressive detonation had exactly the effect Kratos had hoped for-the box slid a few feet toward the throne pillar. Six more thunderbolts pushed it to the very edge of the pillar itself. Kratos scrambled around to the firmer footing of the pillar and set his foot against the back of the Architect’s throne.
“You love the gods so much,” Kratos said as he kicked the throne off the pillar and sent it spinning toward the statue of Hades, “stay with them forever.”
He turned, took hold of a projecting piece of the box’s metalwork, and dragged the vessel of Ares’s destruction onto the pillar-which immediately began to descend.
On the long, long trip downward, Kratos could only stare at the box pensively. He had been told this thing was a weapon-the only weapon that would allow a mortal to slay a god-yet Zeus had commanded the Architect to design the temple so that a mortal might achieve ultimate success and claim its power. He remembered the words of Athena: Zeus has forbidden the gods to wage war on one another. Such a decree must be binding even upon Zeus himself.
Had Zeus ordered a single path be left open because, even a thousand years ago, he had foreseen that someday a god must be killed?
TWENTY-SIX
“YOU CHOSE WELL, my daughter,” Zeus said, as together they watched the scrying pool display the slow descent of the Architect’s throne pillar.
“Ares chose, I refined,” Athena said, unwilling to take her eyes from the image of Kratos until the Spartan and Pandora’s Box reached the entrance level of the temple. “My brother did not understand what he had in Kratos.”
“And so he blunted his best weapon.”
“A weapon that is now deadlier than Ares could ever have forged,” Athena said. They watched the progress of her mortal as he looked around the temple atop the mountain behind Athens. “A question, my lord. Is this the result of your planning?”
He turned from her to point.
“Father…” she began again, but the King of Olympus simply nodded toward the scrying pool, where the throne pillar still descended on its steady pace through the innumerable floors of the temple.
“Your Spartan has nearly reached the temple’s antechamber,” he said. “Is there anything you want to tell him before he goes outside?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Once he brings the box out of the temple, events might begin to unfold swiftly.”
Athena saw that the descending pillar had now reached the antechamber itself, extending downward through the ceiling until it broke through the floor below and continued to sink. The earthquakes this triggered began to shake the whole temple, as well as the mountains above and below it. Chunks of masonry burst outward from the mechanical stresses, and boulders began to rain down upon Cronos’s head.
She willed herself from Olympus to the antechamber of the Temple of Pandora, where she stood, waiting invisibly, while the throne pillar ground its way down to reveal Kratos and Pandora’s Box.
The Spartan appeared unusually pensive as he put his shoulder to the box and began to shove it toward the immense outer doors of the temple. At his touch, a great spray of crackling energy erupted from the giant gemstones.
Athena gathered the sizzling lightning into a semblance of her face. “Kratos, your quest is at an end. You are the first mortal to ever reach Pandora’s Box. There is still time to save Athens. You must bring the box back to my city and use it to kill Ares.”
Kratos lifted his eyes to meet hers, and she noted how meeting the challenges required to free Pandora’s Box had changed him. Bloodlust had been tempered with thoughtfulness. Mercy was beyond his pale, but he had been forged into a more potent weapon, one that would surprise Ares. “Return to Athens, Kratos,” she said. “Return and save my city.”
As she willed herself back to Olympus, Athena heard Kratos’s grunt as he began pushing the ponderous box.
She rematerialized before the throne of Zeus.
Zeus, to her surprise, was still there, still watching the scrying pool. “He’s opening the doors. Watch,” he said, “here it comes.”
“Father, I must transport Kratos and Pandora’s Box back to-”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“But, Father, even to lower the box from Cronos’s back-”