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  ELEVEN

  MONSTERS CAME AT HIM from all directions.

  A Minotaur let out a loud roar and charged ahead of its brothers, swinging a ball and chain over its head. Behind it trotted eleven more and six lumbering Cyclopes-and behind them, half a hundred undead heavy infantry.

  A quick slash of the Blades of Chaos severed the chain of the Minotaur’s weapon, sending the weight at the end flying. Kratos cast a quick glance in the direction the weight had flown, hoping it might take out another of Ares’s army-it caught the nearest Cyclops full in the eye.

  Then the Minotaur was upon him, but Kratos had judged his range to a nicety. He spun the blades in an intersecting flourish. One slashed through the Minotaur’s throat, while the other carved out the creature’s liver. The monster’s legs buckled, and it pitched forward onto its face in a last flurry of legs and horns and the spew of blood. Kratos drove both blades down into its skull and, with a wrench of his mighty shoulders, shattered the creature’s skull and painted its comrades with its brains.

  Cyclopes pressed in upon him, ponderous clubs upraised. Kratos dove forward and rolled between the bowed legs of the one who’d been blinded by the flying chain weight. Clubs thundered to the ground on all sides, making the very earth tremble. One landed on the blind Cyclops’s left foot, crushing its bones with a spray of blood. The wounded monster howled and lifted its foot, holding it with one hand, while its other hand remained clapped to its bleeding eye. The creature hopped about, howling in agony, and Kratos-never slow to press an advantage-kept rolling and diving around the creature’s leg, drawing more club blows that only made the Cyclops’s howl ramp up in volume. Finally the monster lashed out with its free hand and somehow seized one of the others’ clubs, then began to lay about itself with prodigious energy, actually managing to land a number of powerful whacks on its companions.

  Kratos gauged his distance and attacked. One thrust went upward into the creature’s heart. The razored edge of his other blade cut just behind the Cyclops’s knee-and caused it to topple onto Kratos. As quick as he was, Kratos found himself unable to get out from under the massive body that struck him and pinned him to the ground.

  All around he heard Ares’s creatures going wild. Helpless under the quivering, dying mass of the Cyclops, he fought to escape. Then he fought for breath. The Cyclops crushed the wind from his lungs. Try as he might, he could not breathe.

  Kratos heaved, but the beast’s bulk was like sand on the beach. It flowed and filled in any space around him. His lungs began to burn. Venting a huge roar, he tried to shove the Cyclops off him-and failed.

  Rage engulfed Kratos as surely as the Cyclopean flesh. He bit down on the hairy belly smothering him and twisted, ripping away the flesh and opening the stomach cavity. A torrent of fluids doubly threatened to suffocate him; the air in his lungs was being used up fast. He bit again, rending intestines and stomach and moving upward like some vile maggot in the Cyclops’s guts. He spat and strained, arching his back. His head and shoulders entered the creature’s body cavity. Head spinning as the world went black, he heaved again and banged against a mighty rib. Turning to the side, he made one last mighty snap. His teeth closed on sinewy muscle before he sank back, almost dead.

  He sputtered and gasped as fetid air reached his nostrils. He spat out the gore in his mouth and gasped in huge drafts. The sky showed through the hole his teeth had ripped in the Cyclops.

  Kratos shifted from side to side, got his shoulders around, and finally freed one arm that had been pinned under the Cyclops’s bulk. Once he reached up and grabbed the rib, he was able to pull-hard. Half the creature’s body ripped free. Coated with gore and digestive fluids, Kratos struggled upward and finally tumbled from the Cyclops’s side to lie panting on the ground.

  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.

  He was almost running when someone called his name.

  “Kratos.”

  He thought that Ares had found the tunnel and had come for him in person. Swords held in a shaky grip, he turned the tips toward a tiny glowing spot in the darkness.

  “Show yourself. We can have it out here and now.” His muscles quivered from fatigue, but if he finally faced his ultimate enemy, he would die like a Spartan.

  The sudden burst of light forced him to throw up an arm to shield his eyes. Squinting, he saw a massively muscled man step forward out of a shimmer in the air like a sun dog in the brilliant blue of a summer sky. The gray-shot curls of storm clouds that served him for hair and beard would have instantly told Kratos who this was, even if Kratos hadn’t leaped off a statue of him only moments before.

  “My Lord Zeus!” Kratos bowed. “I am surprised. I had thought you might be Ares.”

  “That particular son of mine is still on the other side of Athens, enjoying his rampage,” Zeus said.

  Kratos couldn’t tell from Zeus’s tone whether the Skyfather approved or disapproved of Ares’s onslaught. He decided not to ask. “How may I serve the King of the Gods?”

  “Kratos, you grow stronger as your journey continues. But if you are to succeed in your quest, you will need my aid.”

  “What is your will, Lord Zeus?”

  “I bring you the power of the greatest of all the gods, the Father of Olympus. I give you the power of Zeus!” The King of Olympus reached out and said, “Give me your hands, son.”

  Kratos let the Blades of Chaos slip back into their sheaths. The brilliance pouring into the tunnel at once warmed him and threatened to burn the flesh off his bones. Kratos lifted his arms to the ruler of the gods.

  “Take my weapon, Kratos,” cried Zeus. “Take my power and destroy your enemies!”

  The tunnel roof opened and revealed bright blue sky dotted with clouds. A lightning bolt seared down a jagged path and exploded against Kratos’s outstretched hands. He recoiled-it felt as if he’d plunged his hands into a cauldron of molten iron.

  He pulled back his hands and stared in astonishment at his unburned skin-astonishment arising mostly from the burned-meat smoke that rose from them. Now seared into the palm of his right hand was a tiny jagged white scar that blazed with the light of the sun.

  “Your thunderbolt?” He looked up, but the portal where the god had emerged had already closed. Above there was no longer blue sky and billowing white clouds. All he saw was dirt with roots growing down through it. He had not left the escape tunnel.

  But the scar on his right palm proved almost too brilliant for him to examine.

  Kratos reached back over his right shoulder, as though drawing back his arm to throw a javelin. He grunted in surprise when a solid bolt of lightning manifested in his hand. He hurled it forward, and it lanced along the tunnel quicker than he’d thought. The detonation caused the far end of the tunnel to begin collapsing, opening a sliver of night sky above the Acropolis. Kratos set out toward it, but again he heard a voice-with his ears or with his mind, he could not say.

  “Go back and fight!”

  Kratos stopped, still weak from his earlier conflict. “But the Oracle-”

  “Destroy another three hundred monsters and she’ll be there when you arrive.”

  Kratos was sick of sneaking around underground, feeling like a mewling babe and almost too weak to stand. Once more he reached back, and again when he threw his hand forward, a blast of lightning flashed the length of the tunnel. This one destroyed the timbers that supported the hearth slab, and the whole thing dropped and shattered, scattering the tunnel’s floor with burning embers.

  He nodded to himself. Using the thunderbolt buoyed his spirits-and erased some of the weakness in his muscles. Being so near a godlike power rejuvenated him. Time to go back and see exactly how well this thunderbolt worked against a real enemy.

  TWELVE

  SLAUGHTERING THE MINIONS OF ARES outside the inn proved to be more fun than Kratos had anticipated. When Zeus gave him the power of the thunderbolt, apparently he’d also refilled that general magical reservoir; Poseidon’s Rage crackled more deadly than ever before, and Medusa’s Gaze turned monsters to stone by the dozen, and Zeus’s Thunderbolt shattered a mob of p
etrified monsters in a very satisfactory fashion.

  Best of all, the flood of potent magic through his palm when he used the thunderbolt healed his wounds. Stretching and turning failed to cause the slightest discomfort on his back, where the touch of Ares’s fire had so sorely injured him. After a few throws of the thunderbolt, Ares’s minions had fled, giving Kratos a chance to bathe in a fountain and clean some of the Cyclops’s gore from his body.

  When he’d finished his ablutions, he felt certain he could take on and triumph over the worst that Ares had to offer.

  He found a particular sequence to be most effective: He’d leap into the midst of a crowd of monsters and call on Poseidon’s Rage, then whip out the Gorgon’s head and turn them all to stone, because they would be too stunned from Poseidon’s Rage to avert their eyes. Then he would hurtle into the midst of another squad of the undead legionnaires, fire a thunderbolt back at where he’d come from, and, while the petrified monsters were raining down in pieces, he would once again fire Poseidon’s Rage against the fresh meat around him.

  He became adept enough with Medusa’s Gaze to petrify swooping harpies as they passed, turning them into the equivalent of sharp-edged catapult stones that could mow down a half dozen undead at one blow. And he found that the bronze armor of the undead legionnaires had an interesting property when struck with Zeus’s Thunderbolt: If other similarly clad undead were near enough, the thunderbolt would arc from monster to monster, popping them off in a pleasingly swift succession like chestnuts tossed into a bonfire.

  Kratos stood appreciating his handiwork when the clack of hooves against the cobblestones alerted him to approaching Centaurs. He turned, thinking he would face only one. A herd of the half-horse, half-man creatures trotted into the plaza and quickly arrayed themselves against him.

  Somehow, one had managed to come up behind when his attention was diverted by the main herd. Powerful hands lifted him off the ground and held him high. He saw the sky and struggled to draw a weapon-any weapon. In a flash, Kratos realized he was unable to fight like this. He kicked his feet up high and rolled backward, breaking the Centaur’s grip.