He punctuated his challenge by hurling the severed head at the nearest of the harpies with deadly accuracy and incredible force. It struck her full in the face, cutting off her screech like the blow of an ax. She flipped ass over fangs as she tumbled from the sky to crash into the storm churn, three spans off the port sweeps.
Kratos only glowered. Killing those vile creatures wasn’t even fun.
No challenge.
Kratos’s glower deepened as the storm gave him a glimpse of the merchantman he’d been pursuing. The big ship still had two sails up and was pulling away, running before the wind. Another instant showed him why his ship was falling behind. His oarsmen were cowering in fear of the harpies, pressing themselves into whatever space they might find below their benches or shielded by the thicket of oars. With a wordless snarl, Kratos seized a panicked oarsman by the scruff of his neck and, one-handed, lifted the man up over his head.
“The only monster you should fear is me!” A quick, effortless snap of his wrist cast the coward into the waves. “Now row!”
The surviving crew applied themselves to their oars with frantic energy. The only thing Kratos hated more than harpies was a coward. “And you!” He shook a massive fist at the steersman. “If I have to come back there to steer, I’ll feed you to the harpies!
“Do you have the ship in sight?” His bull-throated roar caused the steersman to cringe. “Do you?”
“A quarter league off the starboard bow,” the steersman called. “But he still has sail! We’ll never catch him!”
“We’ll catch him.”
Kratos had pursued the merchant ship for days. The other captain was a shrewd and able sailor. He’d tried every trick Kratos knew, and even a few new ones, but with every passing day, Kratos’s sleek galley had herded the merchantman ineluctably toward the one hazard no vessel could survive: the Grave of Ships.
Kratos knew his quarry had to come about. To enter that cursed strait was the last mistake any captain would ever make.
Ahead, looming like jagged rocks amid the narrow strait, lay shattered hulks of ships beyond number that had, through misfortune or miscalculation, found their way into the grave. No one knew how many there might be- hundreds, perhaps, or thousands, listing in the tides and the treacherous crosscurrents, grinding their hulls against one another until finally they either broke apart into splintered flotsam or took on enough water to sink. But even that was not the end of their hazard. So many wrecks rested on the seabed below that they had built themselves nearly back up to the Aegean’s surface in artificial reefs, waiting to rip out the hull of any unlucky ship above. These reefs could never be mapped, for no ship that entered the grave ever left it. So many sailors had perished here that the sea itself had taken on a foul reek of rotting meat.
Kratos nodded to himself as the merchantman dropped its sails and unshipped its oars for the turn. Escape was close-or would have been, in any other region of the sea. But the ship was too near already to the Grave of Ships. Even as the merchantman began to reverse course, a colossal head rose from the depths and crashed down on the ship’s deck; then its sinewy neck curled about and tried to break the mast.
Whenever the wind quieted for a moment, Kratos heard plainly the screams and battle cries of the merchantman’s crew as they frantically hacked at the Hydra’s neck with short swords and fire axes. More heads curled upward from the depths below. Kratos signaled the steersman to make straight for them. No point in waiting for them to get free; they were too busy fighting the Hydra to notice that they were being pulled into the grave.
All around floated the deserted, destroyed husks of ships either lacking the protection of the gods or bearing the fate of their condemnation. The closest vessel they passed had clearly arrived not long before Kratos and his quarry. A dozen or so sailors were pinned to the mast-impaled by a single immense spear. Harpies had picked at the bodies. Most of the sailors were mere shreds of flesh hanging on bloody skeletons-but the one closest to the mast was still alive. The sailor caught sight of Kratos and began to kick feebly, stretching out his hands in a silent plea for mercy.
Kratos was more interested in that immense spear-its presence hinted that a Cyclops might be nearby. He stepped to block the steersman’s view of the death ship. “Pay heed to your course.”
“Lord Ares opposes us,” the sailor said in a choked voice. “The harpies-the Hydra-these are now his own creatures! All of them. Would you defy the God of War?”
Kratos cuffed the steersman hard enough to knock him to the deck. “That merchantman has fresh water. We have to take her before she sinks, or we’ll all die swilling the sea. Forget Ares. Worry about Poseidon.” He hauled the man back to his feet and set him at the tiller. “And if Poseidon doesn’t worry you, there is always me.”
For two days they had been without water. His mouth was drier than the Desert of Lost Souls, and his tongue had swollen. Kratos would gladly have traded for the water, but before the deal could be made, the captain of the merchantman had caught a glimpse of him and had decided a wiser course was to flee as though all the hounds of Hades bayed at his heels. Kratos would teach this captain the consequences of such wisdom.
He tugged at his short, pointed beard, combing from it thick clots of blood-harpy or human, he neither knew nor cared. He checked himself for wounds; in the heat of battle, one can be mortally injured without even noticing. Finding none, his fingers unconsciously traced the red tattoo that swept up across his face and shaved head before descending along his back. The red contrasted sharply with the bone white of his skin.
Blood and death. Those were Kratos’s stock in trade. No one who’d ever seen him in battle, no one who’d even heard the tales of his legendary exploits, could mistake him for any other man.
Another impact knocked Kratos into his steersman. The ship shuddered and squealed, and the grinding shriek went on and on. The sailor fell to the deck, and Kratos grabbed the tiller-but it swung freely in his hands.
“The rudder!” the steersman gasped. “The rudder’s sheared away!”
Kratos released the useless tiller and peered over the stern. One of the derelict hulks of the ship reefs had speared his galley like a fish-a spar as thick as his body had been driven up through the hull and had sliced away the entire rudder as it had penetrated the stern from inside and below.
“Starboard sweeps! Backwater! Now!” Kratos roared. “Port sweeps! Pull for your useless lives!”
With a tooth-grinding shriek, the galley ripped clear of the spar. As its bow swung toward the struggling merchantman, Kratos ordered the starboard sweeps to full ahead. He twisted and snarled at the steersman. “Beat the cadence. Make it fast!”
“But-but we’re sinking!”
“Do it!” Kratos turned back to the oarsmen. “The first craven worm to take his hands off his sweep will die where he sits!”
The crew stared at him as if he had been driven mad by the gods.
“Now! Pull!”
Even as the stern sank lower and lower into the water, the galley surged ahead. The merchantman was only a couple of hundred paces away, then a hundred fifty, then An enormous swell driven by the Grave of Ships’ treacherous crosscurrents heeled the galley half over-and instead of righting itself, it crashed down upon a rotting hulk and stuck fast. His ship had nowhere left to go except down.
“If you can, follow,” Kratos told his crew.
If they couldn’t, they weren’t worth saving.
He vaulted the rail and landed cat-footed on a sea-slimed plank. He skidded along it, wheeling his arms for balance. The sea foamed among the jagged drifting planks, and every swell set derelict hulls grinding against one another like wooden millstones. To fall into these waters would be certain death.
Fifty feet ahead bobbed another ship. Its mast had been lopped off, and from the look of the encrusted barnacles and rot-blackened seaweed that festooned the hull, the ship had been a prisoner in the Grave of Ships for many years. Anything that still floated was better than his own galley, which was surrendering to the sea with a vast sucking sound and a chorus of screams from sailors too slow to leap away.
A moment later, the only sounds were the crash of waves and the thin whistle of the slackening gale. Walking quickly across the broken remnants of perished ships, Kratos reached the abandoned hulk. The high curve of slimy hull looked impossible to climb, even for him.
He paused and glanced back to see if any of his crew had followed. Only a handful had avoided being sucked under with the galley-a Hydra’s head rose up from the depths and snapped savagely, taking more of the crew by cutting them into bloody halves. In silence, Kratos watched them die.
He was used to being alone.
