chest, crushing her throbbing heart within her breast. Her pleas trailed to wet, gurgling gasps as she collapsed. Two quick steps brought Kratos within striking distance. Delivering a single accurate cut, he dispatched the undead with the beating heart still clutched in its hand. The undead fell and lay sprawled, the heart pulsating, slowing to a shiver, then finally stopping, as dead as the girl from which it had been ripped.
Kratos stepped back. The carnage seemed to reel around him. He reached out to brace himself against the bulkhead, and still he nearly fell. “Stop,” he growled fiercely at himself; he had no more tolerance of his own weaknesses than he had of others. “These are not… are not
…”
The women’s deaths were no worse than he had seen thousands of times-no worse than he had done with his own hand, without the thinnest sliver of regret.
But the cabin faded as darkness settled around him and the visions began.
Blades slashing through necks, driving into exposed bellies. Screams of pain and the ghastly rattle of death. Heads exploding in a spray of blood. And the old woman waving her crooked hand, cackling like a damned thing.
“No,” Kratos cried. “No!”
Limbs severed. Fields of corpses, crows pecking at eyes staring sightlessly at a leaden sky, maggots eating dead flesh. The blood pooling around bodies on the temple floor-blood pooling around bodies-blood…
And still the demented laughter and the wave of the crooked hand…
“No!” With an effort of will that left him gasping, Kratos wrenched open his eyes. He was not in the temple; he did not face the shrill cackle of the village oracle! He was here, at the far end of ten years, standing in the captain’s quarters of a slave ship, and the slaughtered girls on the floor were not… were not “Athena!” Kratos spun about in a full circle, then fled from the cabin. “Athena!” He dashed to the hatchway leading to the deck. As he burst out onto the gore-soaked planking, he saw again the wooden statue of Athena that had graced his now- sunken ship. The statue stood at the prow of his new ship as she had on the old, impassive wooden eyes judging his every crime.
“Ten years, Athena! I have faithfully served the gods for ten years! When will you banish my nightmares? When? The visions haunt even my waking life!”
With a soft silvery shimmer like water in moonlight, the statue flickered to life. Those impassive wooden eyes now gleamed with the level gray stare of the goddess.
“We require one final task of you, Kratos. Your greatest challenge awaits-in Athens, where even now my brother Ares lays siege.”
Kratos stiffened as new visions assaulted his senses. He smelled fresh blood and raw meat, saw fire and destruction and fields piled with dead. He heard death cries, and he tasted the ash of burning corpses. Kratos forced his eyes shut, but he could not escape the vision. He shared every death with every murdered Athenian. He felt their shades- his shade-ripped screaming from his body, not by the clean stroke of sword or spear but by the gore-crusted talons of Ares’s monstrous minions.
“Athens is on the brink of destruction,” said the goddess through her statue. “ It is the will of Ares that my great city should fall.”
Kratos could only try to endure as ever darker, more gruesome visions assailed him.
“Zeus has forbidden the gods to wage war on one another.”
Kratos felt himself charred with imaginary flame, flesh boiled from his bones-what remained of him twisted into the air, riding a violent whirlwind until he witnessed the death of Athens as it might be seen by a soaring eagle. Then the vision released him, and he fell with shattering force back into his own body on the deck of the slave ship.
“That is why it must be you, Kratos. Only a mortal trained by a god has a chance of defeating Ares.”
“And if I am able to do this,” Kratos said, once more standing firmly upright, as a man should, “if I can kill the god, then the visions… they will end?”
“Complete this final task and the past that consumes you will be forgiven. Have faith, Kratos. The gods do not forget those who come to their aid.”
The statue’s eyes closed, and the shimmer of godhead faded.
Kratos stood motionless for a very long time, feeling a desperately unfamiliar sensation. He marveled at it, this feeling. He couldn’t recall the last time he had felt anything like it.
He wondered if it might be hope.
– -
LATER, KRATOS PACED the length of the deck, taking note of damage and how repairs should proceed. He had a cage filled with slaves in the hold. They would crew for him in exchange for their freedom. Since Athena had entrusted him with the quest to save Athens from Ares’s army of Hades spawned soldiers, he would have no further need of a ship once he arrived at the Harbor of Zea at Piraeus.
The locked captain’s cabin where the three women had been killed hinted at how the former captain of this vessel had whiled away his hours, but Kratos would never again enter that compartment. Even if he had the slaves drag out the bodies and clean it from stem to stern, he would never step into that room again.
He dared not risk more visions.
But there was another room, also magically barred, lacking even a keyhole. The captain had kept concubines in his own cabin; what treasure would he have found precious enough to lock away even from himself? Kratos had little patience for idle speculation. The best way to discover the room’s contents was to break the door and enter.
Edging past the door to the captain’s cabin-he would not allow himself to so much as look at it-he stopped before the magical portal and began to examine it for any obvious way to open it. After all, if the room beyond held anything of real value, he might wish to be able to lock it away too. Finding no handle, lever, or keyhole, he tried simply to shove the door open. Corded muscle bunched in his massive shoulders, but he could not make the door so much as rattle. With a snarl he lost what little patience he’d had. He drew the Blades of Chaos and hacked at the door. Golden force flared, and the blades did not even touch the wood.
Fury rose within him, and outward from his bones surged the Rage of Poseidon. Power made him feel invincible, and the lightning of his fury burned the golden force away-and the door opened at a simple push.
Kratos stared in amazement.
In the middle of the room stood a half-naked woman whose beauty transcended anything in Kratos’s experience. She had her hands on cocked hips and had hair of flaming red more radiant than the sunrise, but this was not what Kratos noted. She was naked to the waist, a skirt swirling about the rest of her trim body. Her bare breasts were firm and high, capped by pink nubs that pointed at him in wanton invitation.
“Were you a slave on this ship?”
“Is the captain dead? I hope so,” the young woman said, leaning toward him with a beckoning finger. “I like your looks better.”
Kratos heard ominous creaking in the hull and looked around to be certain the vessel was not breaking apart. When he turned back, he blinked in surprise. The woman still stood in front of him, hands on her hips, hair wild and red and lustrous. But she was no longer naked to the waist. Rather, she wore a tunic-and had no skirt. She was naked from the waist down, when only an instant before…
“Is that why you were imprisoned with a magical lock? You’re a witch?”
“That’s not a nice thing to say. We aren’t witches!”
“We?” Kratos blinked. There were two women, identical in beauty, but one was naked above the waist and the other below. “What are you?”
“Twins,” they answered as one.
“The captain was a cruel master. He gave us only one set of clothes,” said the twin with the tunic.
The twin with the skirt showed a bit of a pout. “We shared the best we could. Do we not please you?”
“No, I-”
“No?” they cried in unison. “Then we’ll take off these offending rags!”
And they did.
Kratos was willing to admit that this improved the view. “I begin to understand why the captain kept you locked away. Identical down to the last mole and freckle.”
“Not so,” said the one on the left. “Lora’s mole is on the inside of her left thigh. See?”
