The roadway began to fill with refugees, civilians clutching whatever was most precious to them, fleeing the city while they still could to allow the soldiers the best chance to fortify and defend it. Every few hundred yards, the crowds became thick enough to impede his progress-but the impediment was momentary, because Kratos simply cut his way through with the Blades of Chaos. Bloody refugee body parts flew to either side of the Spartan as he ran, and any Athenians who witnessed such a slaughter wisely pressed out of Kratos’s way.
Kratos spared not an instant’s thought for these unfortunates. He wasn’t here to save the civilians-and the Blades of Chaos could drink innocent lives as easily as those of opponents. The surge in his strength from each murder let him run ever faster, until he might have been wearing the winged sandals of Hermes himself.
The heavy black smoke took on a more noxious odor as he neared the ruined gate of the city. The memory of burning corpses could never be erased from his brain. After so many battles, digging graves had been impossible; there were always more dead than there were shovels and men to use them. Kratos had ordered the bodies stacked and set ablaze. The funeral pyre for one had become the pyre of hundreds, and so it was for many years.
The gates of the city lay in shattered ruin. Some few civilians picked their way through the rubble, but more Arean fire rained down upon them; their screams were brief, and soon they became extensions of the pyre. Only the guardhouse remained intact, though it seemed abandoned. As Kratos passed, however, a voice cried from the shadowed window, “You there! Halt!”
The voice was thin and wheezy, and when Kratos turned to look, he found one bent and wizened man, barely strong enough to stand upright in his armor. “State your… State… Uh, what are you doing here?”
“I seek Athena’s oracle, old man.”
The ancient guardsman peered at him myopically. “The Oracle? What for?”
“Where is she?” Kratos asked with as much patience as he could muster.
“She’s got a room in the Parthenon, on the east side of the Acropolis, but…” The old man shook his head woefully. “That area’s on fire. Whole place is on fire. Oracle might be dead. No one has seen her since the fighting began. Once she told me my own future, d’you know that? Now, this was a long time ago. I had to sacrifice-”
Kratos successfully stifled a sudden urge to lop off the old fool’s head. He growled, “How do I get to the Acropolis?”
“Well… you can’t go through here.”
“What?”
“I got my orders from the commander of the watch, just before the gate was knocked down by one of them fireballs. Nobody enters through this gate, what’s left of it, that is.” The old man held a dagger in one quivering hand. “Besides, what d’you want to go in there for? The place is lousy with undead, there’s Cyclopes and worse-and I even seen a Minotaur too!”
Kratos shook his head, thinking of the fight down at the Long Wall. More wasted effort. Ares’s army was already inside the city.
He left the old man babbling to himself and sprinted into dark streets illuminated only by distant unchecked fires.
RUNNING THROUGH THE DARKENING CITY, Kratos cursed himself for a fool, even as the Blades of Chaos sang their crimson song through countless bodies of Ares’s minions. Undead legionnaires flew to pieces so quickly that none broke Kratos’s stride. Skeletal archers fired flaming shafts as he passed, but none even grazed him. He nimbly sidestepped raging Cyclopes and dissipated ghostly wraiths with hardly more than a gesture.
And all for nothing. Just as the slaughter he had meted out at the Long Wall’s breach had been for nothing.
Ares’s army had attacked the wall in the first place not to gain access to the city but because that was where the soldiers were. Ares’s legions lived only to kill. If Athenian soldiers had made a stand down at Piraeus, that’s where those abominations would have attacked. They never needed to cross the walls at all. As Kratos ran, more foes sprang from the earth itself, as though some impossible netherworld had opened the gates of reality to spew its spawn onto Athenian streets.
Kratos cursed himself for fighting them as if they were human.
He no longer paused to slay them. Why bother? Athens and its people could not be protected by the destruction of Ares’s army-the god’s army could not be destroyed. Like dragon’s teeth, each beast Kratos might slay could be recreated on any spot, at any instant. Killing them did nothing but feed power to the blades-power that he didn’t need. To Hades with fighting. He would seek the Oracle, learn her secret, and then be on his way.
As he should have done from the beginning.
From around a corner ahead, he heard snorts and growls and the voices of men shrieking like little children. Soon two Athenian soldiers came in view, running full tilt, their weapons and shields forgotten. They screamed to Kratos that he must run, they’re right behind us! A heartbeat later, Kratos discovered what they were fleeing: a towering creature with the head and hooves of a great bull and the body of a man.
The Minotaur-the Cretan monster supposedly slain by Theseus. Kratos snorted. Why should he be surprised to find the creature alive?
Theseus had been Athenian.
The Minotaur wielded an enormous labris-the double-faced ax of Crete, its blade alone the size of a man and twice as heavy. The great beast raised the labris high overhead and, with a mighty heave, hurled it spinning through the thickening gloom.
One of the soldiers, looking fearfully over his shoulder, saw the blade coming and ducked aside. The other never looked back. The first he learned of the flying ax was when it lopped his head off in one clean slice and whirled on without even slowing. It sang through the air, spinning straight at Kratos’s face.
Kratos judged the distance and the spin, then took one step forward so that the haft of the swirling ax, instead of the gore-smeared blade, smacked his palm. It struck with enough force to kill an ordinary man. Kratos didn’t even blink.
“Run!” the remaining soldier screamed as he sprinted past. “ You have to run! ”
“Spartans,” Kratos replied with scalding contempt, “run toward the enemy.”
The Minotaur gave a snort, lowered his wide-spreading horns, and charged.
Kratos hefted the labris. “You’ll be wanting this back,” he said, and hurled it at the charging monster, who pulled up short, snarling, and attempted to duplicate Kratos’s feat. The Minotaur discovered this was trickier than it had looked.
The Minotaur misjudged the ax’s spin by half a step: The blade sheared through its hand, through its nose and on through its brainpan, before whirling on to vanish in the smoky gloom.
The half-headless corpse stood swaying. Kratos lifted the severed head of the Athenian soldier and hurled it like a rock. The head struck the monster’s chest and knocked the great beast flat.
Kratos sneered down at the dead soldier. As he passed the corpse of the Minotaur, he shook his head and snorted with contempt.
Theseus. Some hero. Only Athenians would make a hero of a man for slaying such a paltry little beast. Good thing Kratos wasn’t here to save the people; he couldn’t stand to look at them.
Before he reached the corner, however, he discovered that he had made a mistake. It had not been the Minotaur; it had been only a Minotaur. The truth of this was revealed to him by the appearance of three more of the towering man-bulls, thundering toward him with axes raised.
Kratos grimly drew the Blades of Chaos without slackening his pace. Another senseless delay. He’d make better time off the streets.
The three Minotaurs spread out to bar his path, but a headlong sprint faster than the gallop of a racing horse gave Kratos the momentum he needed. A dozen strides short of the monsters,
Kratos hurled one Blade of Chaos high, where it whipped over the lip of the nearest balcony. The chain snapped tight and yanked him into the air, over the heads of the astonished Minotaurs. He flipped the other blade at a higher balcony and in this fashion swung himself all the way up to the rooftops.
From here, he could clearly see the Parthenon and beyond it the sky-spanning figure of the God of War, who still hurled handfuls of fiery slag into the city below.
Even that momentary pause was enough for Ares’s minions to locate him again. Flocks of harpies swooped toward his rooftop, wraiths floated through nearby walls, and the building trembled as Minotaurs and Cyclopes scaled its walls.
