nothing more than swirling black smoke. They floated toward him with deceptive ease, then surged forward to attack. Barely did Kratos have time to unleash the Blades of Chaos to defend himself. The wraiths coordinated their attack perfectly, circling him and attacking first from the left, then the right.
Arrows from above did nothing to drive back these creatures. Shafts passed completely, harmlessly, through them, as though their bodies were no more than smoke.
With a blinding flourish of his Hades-forged weapons, Kratos lopped off one bladed hand, but the other wraiths pressed in around him. He defended himself ably as he backed into the breach; the best way to face these creatures was one at a time.
“By the gods, we will stop them!” A squad of swordsmen rushed to Kratos’s assistance, banging their weapons against bronze shields. Their courage far outstripped their skill, but they could take some pressure off him, even against the wraiths.
“Close the gap,” Kratos shouted, engaging a bladed hand before deftly cutting it from the skeletal wrist. “You cannot defend this breach for long.” And wraiths were starting to hack away at the ragged edges of the wall to make a larger hole. If it got much larger, the Athenians couldn’t hold it at all-and Kratos didn’t want to have to guard his own back as he ran for the city.
“I don’t recognize you,” said a young soldier, coming up behind. “Why aren’t you in armor?”
“Send for engineers, fool!” Kratos snarled. “If the monsters take this breach, Athens’s belly lies exposed!”
The young warrior began barking orders, and the other Athenians seemed relieved to have someone tell them what to do. The soldiers nearest forced their way into the breach, making a wall of their shields and their own bodies to keep back the Hades-spawned hordes. Others dragged heavy timbers, rubble, and anything at all they could use as a barricade to pile at the hole, but to Kratos it was clear this was futile. The pressure against a handful of men was too great, and no permanent repair could be made with wraiths and legionnaires constantly hacking to enlarge the gap.
The last of the Athenians at the breach fell to undead archers. A half dozen burst through, unleashing fire arrows wildly in all directions; each one that struck true exploded in a burst of flame and took an Athenian life. Kratos unleashed the Blades of Chaos once more and took out two of the skeletal creatures before they could create more havoc along the aerial walkways. The rest of the undead archers concentrated their fire on the fresh soldiers racing to plug the hole. They were devastatingly effective. By the time Kratos had killed the archers at the gap, the wraiths beyond had widened the hole enough for another Cyclops to barrel through.
Kratos plunged forward to meet the monster’s charge. Using his preternatural strength, he lifted the Cyclops from its feet and drove it back through the breach, into the wraiths and undead legionnaires outside. The Cyclops cleared its way with a few swings of its immense club, knocking undead to pieces and sending wraiths flipping through the air, then strode forward to again vie with Kratos. New legionnaires pushed forward to continue chipping away at the wall, widening the breach with each blow.
Kratos judged his distance, then launched a long thrust with both blades. He slashed the Cyclops’s throat on either side, then pulled back hard, hooking the curves of the blades behind the creature’s neck. As the blades ripped free, the Cyclops’s head flipped from its shoulders, bounced on the ground, and rolled past Kratos’s feet. A fountain of blood shot skyward from the creature’s neck, and Kratos lifted his face to the scarlet shower as though it were cool spring rain. He plucked the unseeing eye out and held it high over his head, then heaved it in defiance at Ares’s advancing minions.
“More!” he shouted at the horde outside. “Come on! Come and die!”
One hard kick toppled the swaying bulk of the dead monster across the breach, creating a barricade over which the attacking creatures had to scramble. The archers on the wall above took a terrible toll as feathered shafts pinned legionnaires to the fallen Cyclops and to one another.
Before, his victory had been cheered. Now there was no time. A pair of Cyclopes moved up to the breach and began tossing aside undead legionnaires from the growing pile, clearing the way for more monsters, while wraiths floated overhead, their ghastly blades carving nearby archers into bloody chunks of meat.
Kratos again made a grim assessment of the odds. He did not know how Athena hoped he might save her city, but he was reasonably sure she did not intend he should give his life over one small gap more than a mile from the city proper.
He sheathed the Blades of Chaos and stared at his hands. Power welled up within as he unleashed his anger, and Kratos felt himself become the conduit for godlike power once more. The Rage of Poseidon was with him still.
Pushing through the struggling fighters, he climbed atop the dead Cyclops and looked at the hundreds and thousands of Ares’s killers readying themselves to pour through the ever-widening hole in the wall. Kratos held out his hands, as if to push them all away. He staggered as the power built within him. Lifting his hands, elbows locked, he closed his eyes and concentrated on what he wanted most.
Annihilating energy erupted around him, plowing a fifty-foot furrow deeper than a moat in front of him. Kratos spread his hands outward, and the furrow became a crater. He directed the Rage of Poseidon downward, outward, then downward a final time before he sank to his knees in exhaustion from the effort.
The corpse of the Cyclops was gone, burned so thoroughly there was not even smoke-as were the other Cyclopes, all the nearby wraiths, several hundred undead legionnaires, some few yards of the Long Walls and a number of the Athenian archers.
Between him and the remainder of Ares’s army gaped a pit a hundred feet deep and almost as wide. To reach the gap now, the horde outside faced a long descent and a perilous scramble up a steep slope slippery with ash, fully exposed to archers above.
The monsters seemed undeterred; they were already sliding down the far rim of the pit. Even if they had to fill the entire crater with their own bodies, soon these misbegotten creatures would flood through the wall in their thousands upon thousands. Nothing could stop them.
Kratos drew the Blades of Chaos and settled into himself, grimly waiting at the breach.
This was going to be a long fight.
SEVEN
UNDEAD LEGIONNAIRES TRAMPED ALONG a game trail in the still forest, weapons clanging against their sides with every step. Some carried scythes and others swung spiked clubs as they made their way to support the rear echelons of the force attacking the breach in the Long Wall. The leader slowed and then raised a bony limb to halt his patrol.
Bushes rustled. The legionnaires turned toward the sound and drew weapons, but from behind them a large gray wolf leaped, snarling at the leader as it knocked the legionnaire to the ground. Strong jaws closed on a bony neck and crushed it, ripping away the undead head. As the wolf turned to do the same to the next, its savage growls called the rest of the pack to come loping out of the forest in their ambush. The creatures from Hades tried to defend themselves, but these wolves fought with a cunning and ferocity that would astonish any huntsman. Some of the skeletal beings could only jerk and twitch as their legs were gnawed off. Others threw knives and axes and even swords at the wolves, but the sleek gray killers slipped aside, then returned to match their jaws against the bony talons of the disarmed undead. Shortly, “disarmed” was no longer a figure of speech.
Quiet descended on the forest once again as the wolf pack melted away, prowling their territory in search of new victims, and two goddesses materialized at the scene of the slaughter.
Athena said, “Your creatures fight well.”
Artemis squinted skyward, measuring the soar of eagles and the slow wheel of vultures. “The birds speak to me of new incursions,” she said. “Our brother is slow to learn.”
“So let us offer further lessons without delay,” Athena said. “Though all the wolves in the world would not be enough to destroy his army, we can at least keep him from your groves.”
The huntress favored her with a piercing stare. “We?”
Before Athena could respond, Artemis vanished. Athena sighed and with a brief gesture followed her to a large glade filling with Ares’s soldiers. The monsters milled about in considerable disarray. The creatures who held
