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The burned spot began glowing until it was orange-hot. Then red-hot. Kratos raised his arm to protect his eyes as it turned white-hot. Even at this distance, the heat proved enough to cause sweat to bead on his bare chest. With a puff of molten metal, the chest of the statue opened. He knew where his path lay.

  Descending the side of the new statue, Kratos returned to the floor and immediately faced another of the Architect’s diabolical traps. Rolling balls of molten rock spewed from the opening where he must go. The heat threatened to blister his bone-white skin, but Kratos never slowed. To do so would spell his death.

  Feet pounding against the floor, he ran forward as hard as he could, dodging the spheres of death as they tumbled outward. Less than fifty feet into the tunnel, a door emblazoned with Lord Hades’s smirking face had been set into the wall. Rolling, diving, he crossed the pathway intermittently filled with molten death and grabbed the bottom of the door. From his right came another rock-thundering directly for him.

  With a convulsive yank, Kratos lifted the door and rolled under it a split second before the rock would have crushed and burned him.

  The tunnel stretched before him. Stride sure, he set off. He returned to the floor of the huge chamber, where molten rock poured down the walls and lit it with an eerie glow more suited to the underworld than a temple. This aspect was fearsome, but he saw at the far end of the chamber guarding the way forward what had to be the most deadly creature he had ever faced. Armored like a soldier, the Minotaur towered thirty feet above him. Every snort produced thick pillars of roiling black smoke from its nostrils, and as it opened its mouth Kratos reacted instantly, spinning away from a gout of hellfire that singed his back and arms in spite of his quick reaction.

  He somersaulted forward, drew the Blades of Chaos, and attacked.

  For all its size, the armored creature, which looked more like a machine than a living-or undead-beast, moved slowly and gave Kratos many opportunities to hammer at it. Bit by bit he chipped away its armor, but he eventually saw that this would never be enough. The creature was too large, too powerful, and withstood the most savage blows he could deliver with his weapons. After having used the Blade of Artemis, Kratos knew that even this potent sword would not be enough.

  He rolled, barely avoiding a huge armored fist that crushed the floor and left only stony shards behind. He slashed with his swords but produced nothing but a nick. The immense Minotaur reared up, and dazzling light shot forth from the gorget around its neck. Wherever those beams touched the stone walls, huge holes appeared. The Minotaur swung its head about, roared, and drove both fists downward in an attempt to smash Kratos flat. He bounced one blade off an iron-clad wrist, then rolled forward and cast forth the Blades of Chaos as if they were climbing hooks. He fastened the curved tips into the Minotaur’s armor and yanked, hauling himself up onto the Minotaur’s metal-spined back. Swinging around, he tugged hard, feet pressed into the creature’s back in an attempt to weaken the powerful neck muscles and bring up the head to expose the throat.

  The beast roared in defiance and again smashed its fists down hard on the ground, sending Kratos flying through the air. He landed flat on his back. Looking up, he saw the armored Minotaur’s eyes blaze with infernal light. It opened its mouth and spewed deadly fire. Kratos rolled onto his belly and drew himself up barely in time to avoid the devastating breath. From this position, he launched himself again, blades swinging. He singled out the left wrist and succeeded in cutting the straps holding part of the gauntlet to the Minotaur’s hand. It was so little, but it was a start.

  Kratos backed away, judged what had to be done, and then did it. He attacked, bringing the creature to its full height; then he somersaulted to the side of the chamber, found the way up to the lower catwalk, and ran to the lever controlling the ballista. The creature roared, and its eyes flashed fiery red as it retaliated. When it opened its mouth to spew forth more flame, Kratos shoved the lever down and sent a ballista bolt directly into the monster’s chest. It stood a little straighter, touched the spot where Kratos had ripped away several armor plates, then screeched in fury and came for him again.

  Kratos vaulted off the catwalk, hit the stone floor hard, and used some of his forward momentum to augment the power of his slashing attack. This time he severed part of the Minotaur’s left wrist and was rewarded with a bellow that deafened him. He knew it could be hurt. That meant it could be killed. As he stepped up to take another cut, he grew careless-his minor victory had filled him with false confidence.

  The Minotaur’s armored right fist crashed into his blades, tangling their chains, and Kratos found himself lifted high off the floor. Dangling from the chains fused into his forearms, Kratos was powerless to attack-or escape. He stared into the Minotaur’s burning eyes. The monstrous man-bull opened its mouth as if to bite him in two, but Kratos saw the fire within the creature’s gut building. He was going to be roasted as he hung by the chains of his swords. A sharp jerk to the side set him spinning. He heaved and spun in the opposite direction and then bunched his powerful belly muscles and kicked hard. The toe of his boot found purchase against a protruding spike on the Minotaur’s shoulder armor. He swung away as the hell creature’s searing flame erupted from its mouth.

  Kratos wrapped his legs around the armor spike, twisted as hard as he could, and wrenched himself upward and back. The chains snapped free and he slid down the Minotaur’s spine, fighting to keep from impaling himself on the spikes mounted everywhere. Kratos caught one, stopped his slide, and immediately renewed his attack. Again the Blades of Chaos served as hooks, but this time he penetrated the armor and sank their punishing tips into man-bull flesh.

  The Minotaur roared, reared, and tried to throw him off. Kratos hung on tenaciously, refusing to quit-to die. He got his feet under him and pulled as hard as he could on the chains until the blades ripped free, bringing with them gory hunks of the Minotaur’s neck. From the way the creature’s head drooped now, it was weakening. Grasping the hilts of his swords, Kratos jumped free, cutting at exposed man-bull at every possible opportunity. The left hand, where he had exposed flesh by cutting away armor, proved an exceptionally vulnerable area. He left deep, if not fatal, wounds all the way down the arm before he hit the stone floor once more.

  The Minotaur roared in frustration at its wounds, at being unable to crush the Ghost of Sparta. It smashed its fists down in an attempt to turn him to bloody pulp, but again it missed by inches. Kratos waded in and severed an artery on the man-bull’s left forearm. As the blood spurted forth, the creature roared, and light blazed from both neck and eyes. Kratos noted that whenever the deadly beams hit stone now, they caused less damage than before.

  He rolled, avoided another furious fist blow, and ran up the steps once more to the catwalk. The Minotaur vented its rage, reared, and presented him with a perfect target. He yanked hard on the lever, firing the ballista. The huge wooden shaft sailed forth and hit the Minotaur in the face, pinning the monster to the door. It shuddered as death throes racked its monstrous body, its thunderous roaring slowly fading.

  Kratos caught his breath, waiting for the door to open. It did not. The Minotaur hung suspended from the still-secured door.

  Other than the hissing as lava waterfalled from the highest reaches of the chamber, there was only silence. A final convulsive spasm left the Minotaur a ghastly decoration mocking Kratos in its death.

  His rage mounted. Looking around for another ballista bolt and not finding it only fed his anger. The Minotaur had died from the heavy shaft; Kratos had thought to send another through it to break down the door, but this was denied him. Pulling the Blades of Chaos out, he dropped from the catwalk and stormed forward, the deadly swords hissing through the air as he swung them. He would carve up the Minotaur and then hack his way through the door. He would not be denied!

  As he approached, he saw a new danger. Blood dripped from the man-bull’s sundered head. Every drop hissed and burned the stone floor. The pools of black blood spread, forcing him to vault ov
er them. Then Kratos looked up and saw the horned head loll to the side as it pulled free of the impaling bolt. What had been a steady drip of blood now became a waterfall.

  Kratos sprinted forward. Spartans never retreated! He winced as the acid blood spattered his back, his arms, his legs. Pain goaded him forward until he slammed into the door next to a huge bull leg. Panting, he looked up at the body, which was now slowly sliding down the door because the head had pulled free of the bolt. More Minotaur blood cascaded downward, but Kratos ignored it when he saw the condition of the door that had blocked his progress.

  A crack in the door made its way downward from where the ballista bolt had slammed through the Minotaur. Hope flared. Kratos drove both blades into the thin fissure. His powerful shoulders screamed in exertion as he levered apart the crack. At first nothing happened. The blades did not budge and the crack did not widen. His entire world was reduced to the pressure he applied to the blades and the waterfall of poisonous blood from above.

  Pain. Burning. His muscles at the breaking point. Then Kratos vented a victory cry. The crack exploded in all directions as a section of the door shattered like glass, giving him a crevice hardly the size of his massive body. He turned sideways, squeezed through, and fell to his knees on the far side of the door, only to roll forward as torrents of Minotaur blood gushed after him.

  Kratos stood and ran down the new passageway, winding back and forth through the walls until he came to a sarcophagus matching the one he had found earlier. A stone book on a pedestal commemorated the death of the Architect’s second son.

  With a savage growl, Kratos jumped to the top of the coffin, shoved back the lid, and tore off the head of this mummified body. He held it high, but, unlike before, he did not think to throw it from him. He stared at it and knew what to do with it, where it fit, knew that it was the key to the Temple of Pandora.

  Retracing his steps to the Rings of Pandora, he avoided the stone roller and once more stood on the rim of the water-filled core. Below he had found a door that blocked his way, a door with a skull etched into the stone. Kratos dived down, kicking powerfully through the water, and hung in front of the portal.

  Pressing the skull into the outline on the door caused the water to drain all about him. The water level in the central pool descended rapidly, allowing him to pull open the door.

  Behind the door was an elevator. He stepped in, and the cage dropped downward with a speed that took away his breath. The sudden stop drove Kratos to his knees, but when the door opened, he knew where he was.

  He stepped out to claim Pandora’s Box.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  KRATOS STOOD in a circular room with two arches exactly opposite each other that opened on corridors leading away. He rocked back, expecting creatures or fighters to pour through one or both of the archways. Back pressed against a blank wall, he waited for death to rush forth.

  Nothing came.

  He looked around, baffled. Had there been one other room in this entire infinite, ancient complex that did nothing at all? No monsters. No death traps. No impassable obstacles.

  Two exits. That was all.

  For the first time, he was starting to worry.

  He walked to one archway and peered through. The floor turned in a downward spiral, cutting off his view of what lay more than a few feet away. He pressed his ear against the wall. Nothing. He spun about, sword leveled… but nothing was creeping up behind him.

  The other archway differed from the first only in that the corridor spiraled upward instead of down.

  A simple choice. A straightforward choice. Up or down. Athena had said that Pandora’s Box rested at the summit and that downward lay only defeat and death. He supposed he’d gone a bit far to start doubting the goddess now. He moved carefully onto the upward spiral, stalking upward with blades in hand, ready for anything. Almost anything.

  Anything except what he found.

  The space he came upon was huge, open to a midnight sky and the cold shimmer of countless stars. There was light here, though: firelight. This firelight was the color of burning cities, and it shone from the hair and beard atop the mountainous figure of the armed and armored god before him.

  A terrible icy shock raked his body and shook him like a dead leaf in a winter gale. His voice came out a whisper, a bare breath.

  “Ares…”

  Gods always hear their name when called, even if only in the dream of some creature on the far side of the world. Kratos’s whisper brought the God of War wheeling about like a thunderstorm spinning into a tornado.

  “Kratos…” Ares’s voice grated like a landslide. “I knew you were too stupid to run from me forever!”

  And, now that the end had come, Kratos discovered he was ready for this after all.

  “Run? From you?” Kratos shouted at the top of his lungs, throwing wide his arms to flourish the Blades of Chaos. “You trained me too well-I learned too much to ever run!”

  Ares drew his warship-size blade with a sound like the screams of murdered children. His flaming hair rained fire down upon Kratos as the god stepped forward. “ You talk like a man, but you shake like a woman. Did your wife shiver so? ”

  All hope of restraint incinerated in the white fire of Kratos’s rage. He hurled himself at the god with every shred of his superhuman strength, releasing the Blades of Chaos and drawing the sword given him by Artemis from behind his neck. As he fell, he drove the irresistible edge of the blade down like a spike through the foot of the god.

  The blade of Artemis drove into Olympian flesh to its very hilt-and Ares laughed.

  “I thank you, Spartan. Sand fleas had given me a terrible itch.”

  “I’ll give you more,” Kratos snarled, as he rolled himself across the god’s instep. He leaped headlong up toward Ares’s knee, Artemis’s sword raised to slice the hamstring-but the huge blade of the god flashed downward and slapped Kratos from the air as though the Spartan were no more than a wasp or a biting fly.

  Kratos hurtled through the air until he crashed into a wall with stunning force. The rock at his back crumbled, and he slid down it to the ground, trying to shake the blurriness from his eyes and the ringing from his ears.

  The god had bladed him. Slapped him with the flat of the blade, as a Spartan father disciplines a naughty child.

  Ares didn’t respect him enough to use the edge.

  “ And why should I? ” said the god, as if he could hear Kratos’s thoughts. “You would be no more than picked bones and crow shit had I not saved you. Do you remember, Spartan? Do you remember falling to your knees with tears on your cheeks, as you begged me-begged like a whipped cur, like a slave- to save your worthless life? If one of your men had begged you thus, you would have killed him for dishonoring Sparta!”

  “You should have killed me,” Kratos growled. “My weakness dishonored Sparta-and all the world would be better today if I had died on that field.”

  “Your Spartan honor means nothing to me. You begged. I answered. I arose from my bed on Olympus and descended upon that field to dry your tears. To fight your battle for you. To win where you had lost. To triumph where you had failed.”

  The god lifted one house-size foot, as if to crush Kratos like an ant beneath his sandal. Kratos tried to dive out of the way, but the god was as fast as he was huge. The sandal pinned Kratos facedown to the ground. Kratos tasted dirt and blood, and in that second he saw himself again, battered to the bloody earth by the immense war mallet of the barbarian king. He heard his voice cry out to Ares and swear eternal servitude.

  “Do you remember what you said to me that day? The price you set for your worthless survival? Say it now, Kratos. Say it.”

  The pressure of the vast sandal crushing his back increased. Kratos felt his ribs cracking, and he could no longer draw a breath.

  And he heard in his memory the words he had spoken on that day.

  My life is yours, Lord Ares. I swear it.

  But here and now he could not make his lips form the word
s. He tried-he did try, telling himself that nine little words meant nothing, that to give the god his petty victory would mean Kratos might yet have another chance to recover Pandora’s Box and face the blood-mad Olympian on equal terms-but the words would not come out.

  He couldn’t even truly think them.

  The room and the crushing weight of the god all vanished behind the visions, the waking nightmares that had turned his life to an ocean of blood and suffering.

  He had served Ares not only with his sword arm but with his whole heart, his mind, and every scrap of his gift for unstoppable brutality.

  THE ARMY OF SPARTA became invincible. Opposing warriors quaked in fear to see Kratos’s Spartans take the field; at the first javelin cast, they dropped their weapons and ran home to tremble behind their mothers’ skirts. The Fist of Ares gave no quarter. Fleeing soldiers would be cut down, to a man. Parties suing for peace were brutally slaughtered. All the world trembled before the battle cry of the Spartans when Kratos stood at their head.

  No quarter. No prisoners. No mercy.

  Many were the princes who pled with Kratos to accept their surrender, to save a remnant of their army and their city, even if it meant slavery in a Spartan kitchen. He refused to hear such pleas. Surrender was never granted. Victory or death in battle were the only acceptable outcomes-Kratos expected no less from his own soldiers.

  Kratos told his soldiers that he killed because Ares commanded him-but in truth he killed for his own pleasure. He killed because slaughter was his gift. His passion. Because he loved nothing more than the smell of blood, the screams of the dying, the sight of an army of corpses rotting on the battlefield.

  “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…”