As the ashes had arisen from their resting place and painted themselves upon his skin forever, Kratos was able only to stand, to swallow his grief, and to accept the doom the gods had pronounced upon him. With that curse, all would know him for the beast he had become.
His skin white with the ash of his dead family, the Ghost of Sparta was born.
But he had never dreamed he would come so close-he had never dreamed he would die in the Desert of Lost Souls, Pandora’s Box itself the last sight his failing eyes would ever behold…
As the darkness of death closed down his vision, the four harpies flapped down from the sky, seized the box in their talons, and lifted away again.
West.
Toward Athens.
Knowing how completely he had failed, he could no longer hold on to life. With one last convulsive shudder, Kratos died.
But for the Ghost of Sparta, even death was not the end.
TWENTY-EIGHT
KRATOS FELL, AND FELL, and fell alongside hundreds of other men and women falling beside him. He plunged through the blood-hazed gloom of Hades, falling toward the shores of the river Styx.
He knew this place.
He had been here before.
But his previous sojourn had been as a living man, a mortal invader among the shades of the dead. Now he was a shade himself-and no shade, no matter the greatness of the hero it had been in life, ever escaped from the kingdom of Hades.
He checked himself over as he fell endlessly. His skin appeared as white as it had been in life, his tattoos as red. His flesh felt as solid as it ever had, his arms as strong. No mark remained of the giant weapon that had ripped him out of mortal life. He felt, surprisingly enough, thoroughly fine.
He thought of his wife and child already in the underworld ahead of him. His punishment might be to kill them over and over for all eternity, unable to stop himself, in the same way as fresh fruit and pure water were eternally just beyond the grasp of Tantalus.
The wind whipped at his face; resolve hardened in his chest. He was a warrior of Sparta. Until he found himself in Charon’s boat, rowing across the river Styx, he was not dead. Not quite. What state he might actually inhabit was a question best left for a philosopher, since Kratos had never been interested in abstractions. He didn’t mind dying. He only wanted to make sure that the weeping shade of Ares reached the Styx first.
He had fallen so far that now he began to see the landscape of the underworld. Though he was still too high to see the river, he began to pick out solid-seeming bone-white structures that stood or crossed or loomed in the blood-colored gloom below. Falling still more, he discovered that these structures were bone white for a very good reason.
They were bones.
Bones too large to belong to even gods. Kratos fell past a rib cage in which each rib was larger than the Hydra’s master head. Below the ribs, he spied a spinal column in which each vertebra was the size of the Parthenon.
He tucked his arms tightly to his body and spread his legs just enough to tip him facedownward. As he fell, slight adjustments in the span of his legs, or the angle of one or both of his hands, kept him angling toward the great bony protuberances. He didn’t worry about how hard he was going to land. He was already dead; how much harm could it do? He plummeted toward the spine at an astonishing speed. As he fell closer and closer, he could make out the tiny figures of other shades who’d had the same inspiration-they sat or lay or clung desperately to the bones, seeming to want only to delay their final plunge to the Styx.
His last few yards passed at blinding speed, and the impact came in a shattering white flash-with no pain at all, which was what he had expected. What he had not expected was that he would bounce.
He found himself tumbling again, flailing. He struck another vertebra but skidded over the edge before he could get a grip. Scrambling desperately now, he clutched at anything he passed, because he was about to go over the edge of the tailbone and he didn’t see anything else between him and the sluggish black river that marked the border of Hades.
At the last instant, his hand caught something. He heard a scream of panic, and as he dangled by one hand above that all-too-final drop, he discovered that he had grabbed a bony, withered ankle.
“Let go, idiot!” the man he’d grabbed screamed. “I can’t hold us both!”
“Just hang on,” Kratos said through his teeth. “Hold tight and I’ll get us out of this.” Grimly, he pulled himself up to where he could get a grip on the man’s knee with his other hand.
“My arms,” moaned the man. “You’re pulling my arms out of their sockets! Let go!”
Kratos counted himself lucky: The man was so withered that the Spartan could close his hand around the fellow’s thigh.
The man tried to kick him off. “You won’t drag me down to that cursed river!”
“There’s a task left for me above,” Kratos growled, “and I will see it completed.”
“I don’t care! Let go!”
The man screamed as Kratos hauled himself higher and drove his hand like a spear deeply into the man’s side; he hooked his fingers over the man’s hipbone and kept on climbing.
His next handhold was at the man’s shoulder, then his other shoulder, and finally Kratos could grasp the same prominence that the other clung to. It was then a simple matter for Kratos to clamber up onto the vertebra. He turned back to the man he had used as a ladder.
It was the captain of the merchant ship from the Grave of Ships.
The captain recognized Kratos in the same instant. A look of pure horror twisted his face. “Oh, no. Not you again!”
Kratos stepped close to the edge and kicked the captain’s hands off the bone.
The captain had a penetrating voice, and Kratos heard him screaming curses as his shade cartwheeled downward to vanish in the blood mist above the Styx.
Kratos turned and scanned the skeletal landscape. He began to climb.
Scaling vertebra after vertebra, he toiled upward for an unknown span of time. The light here never changed, and Kratos never tired. He kept climbing.
When he reached the ribs, miles above where he had begun, he discovered a new feature of this peculiar realm: Undead. Skeletons. Legionnaires. But these were no naked shades; they were armored, armed with all manner of weapons, and thirsty for blood, as they had been in the world above.
They spread out to intercept his passage. As they moved into position, Kratos saw that they were not alone. Two Minotaurs bearing battle axes and a massive Centaur brandishing a sword as long as Kratos was tall stood with them. The Centaur looked familiar.
“I know you, Spartan!” the Centaur growled. “You sent me here only days ago, on a street in Athens.”
“And it’s so with all of you, isn’t it? I killed you all.”
The Centaur grinned hugely, opening his arms as if in welcome. “And all of us are here to return the favor!”
Kratos looked farther up and discovered he could chart his path by noting where creatures waited for him. Every bone that led upward was crowded with enemies who had died at his hands. He began to climb the bone up to the first group. The Centaur bellowed, whirling his enormous sword around his head.
HOURS-DAYS, MONTHS, DECADES -Kratos spent in battle. Still he never tired, and the light never changed, and he never ran out of enemies. He climbed and then he fought. He jumped, then found himself facing a column of immense height-studded with counterrotating segments of viciously sharp blades.
Kratos stepped back and tried to see the top of the column. It vanished into the blood-red mists above. The swish swish of the rotating blades cut through the air but could not drown out the cries of men and women falling to Lord Hades’s embrace far below. Kratos had come a considerable distance to reach this point, and there was more to go if he wanted to kill a god.