Kratos stood over the dying Siren for a moment, with nothing resembling pity on his face. He crushed her head with a stomp of his sandal.
He hurried up the steps into the razed structure. Oddly, though the place appeared to be a ruin, the stairways and corridors were all lined with burning lamps, so he had not the slightest difficulty seeing his way. He followed the light…
… and eventually burst out into daylight again, on a balcony of dizzying height, looking upon the endless sandstorm raging across the Desert of Lost Souls. Kratos paused to examine crude reliefs carved on the walls to either side. One depicted gods appearing before Pathos Verdes III, commanding him to build a mighty temple to house the greatest weapon on earth or Olympus. The other showed the temple being chained to the back of Cronos-a disrespectful way for Zeus to treat his own father, even if Cronos had tried to eat Zeus as soon as the future king was born. Chained to the stone at the far lip of the balcony stood a horn larger than Kratos’s whole body. Curious carvings raked backward along the length of the horn; precious jewels rimmed its far end. Heavy chains fastened the horn into place at the edge of the balcony. Kratos went to the smaller end of the great horn, put his lips to it, and blew.
A mighty blast roared from the horn’s opposite end, harrowing apart the swirling desert sands before Kratos and somehow holding them at bay to open a path before him. Far in the distance along this path, he glimpsed another structure, a grander and more curious one. As he squinted at it, trying to make out details, that mighty temple began to move toward him. Kratos sucked in his breath as he saw Cronos arch and cause the Temple of Pandora chained to his back to shake and rumble. Then the Titan, on hands and knees, turned and passed close to the edge of the balcony where Kratos watched.
Kratos had no time to think. He reacted. A heavy chain dangling from the Titan’s side swept past. With a powerful leap, Kratos launched himself into the air. His fingers closed about the chain, and then he was whipped about as Cronos changed direction and plunged back into the depths of the sea of sand.
SIXTEEN
HANDS BLOODIED AND ACHING, Kratos finally reached the top of the Titan’s mountainous side. For three long days he had climbed-and for the whole of the most recent day he had no longer been scaling Cronos’s hide but instead chipping his way up the mountain chained to Cronos’s back. He had lashed himself to the Titan’s side and slept fitfully several times, but on the long, long rock climb he had pushed upward without true rest. Worse was the lack of food and water as he worked ever higher on the vast Titan. When he had begun, Kratos thought the Titan moved slowly, but the higher he climbed on the side, the more he realized that Cronos sped along. Even though he crawled on hands and knees, each motion was so huge that the wind of his passage had very nearly stripped Kratos from his side more than once.
Kratos’s blasts on the horn had summoned from the depths of the Desert of Lost Souls this great mountain of a Titan, his immortal face worn by time and sand into smooth curves of eternal sadness.
A mountain nearly as tall again rested on the mighty Cronos’s back. At its uppermost lip, Kratos crawled up and over, to find himself face-to-face with an enormous vulture, who was happily ripping an eye from the corpse of a dead soldier.
Kratos frowned. What was that soldier doing here?
Kratos stood to get an idea of the landscape. The mountain’s height would have let him see leagues away, if not for the permanent swirl of sandstorm in the Desert of Lost Souls. But he was more interested in what lay near at hand.
Not far away rose huge but plain sandstone blocks and a crude bronze-and-wooden gate at the front of the magnificent temple. The walls could be solid gold and the plaza paved with diamonds for all Kratos cared. Kratos was indifferent to wealth. He would secure what the temple had been constructed to defend and be on his way.
Kratos reacted instinctively when a harpy described a long, sweeping arc through the skies overhead. He drew the Blades of Chaos and set himself to fight-but the winged creature completed its curve toward the temple.
He jogged forward.
Kratos watched warily as harpies flocked around the Temple of Pandora like bats around a bell tower. Below them, on some sort of broad stone deck, an immense bonfire burned, and the smoke that twisted upward from it was greasy and black. A shift in the wind brought it to Kratos’s nose, and he knew the smell.
The fuel for this fire was human corpses.
Scaling the last few feet proved too much for him. He had to spend considerable time searching before he found some stone blocks that could be fashioned into a crude stair. After scrambling up to a level place, Kratos discovered that what burned here was not a funeral pyre but instead was contained within a huge fire bowl of bronze and stone, whose rim was twice Kratos’s height.
As Kratos approached, the harsh screech of a harpy drew his eyes skyward, in time to see the hideous she- creature open her talons and let drop another corpse-another soldier, it seemed. Bronze armor glinted briefly in the afternoon sun, then clashed like cymbals when its bearer hit the bowl.
“That’ll be you one day. And sooner rather than later would be my bet.”
Kratos spun and the blades found his hands. Limping toward him, using a long staff as a crutch, came some sort of undead too decrepit to even wield a sword or scythe. Its head was mostly exposed skull, one arm ended in a splintery stub of bone, and its right leg was gone below the knee. The one side of its rib cage that was exposed to Kratos’s sight did seem to house internal organs-leathery lungs and a black heart, which pulsed as slowly as the creature stepped. The staff on which it supported itself was fire-blackened and charred at one end.
Kratos scowled at him. He didn’t know how to deal with an undead that wasn’t trying to kill him, let alone one that could actually speak. “What are you?”
“Once I was a soldier. Now…” It jerked its head toward the fire bowl. “I look after this.”
From above came fierce flapping as a harpy circled and released another body to impact in the huge bowl.
The eye within the skull socket seemed to flicker like the flames in the bowl above. “Everybody around here ends up in the fire. Except for me.”
“Everybody?” Kratos asked with a frown. “There are others?”
“Still alive? Probably not. But you never know.”
“I have come a considerable distance-”
“And you’re no closer to your goal. Not really. Zeus hid Pandora’s Box in this wretched temple so no mortal could ever claim its power. And yet, year after year, I open the gate for more and more seekers-and shove more and more bodies into the fire.”
With another screech, a new harpy appeared. The winged monster dropped a fresh-looking body that missed the center of the bowl, ending up draped over the rim. Rather than descend to rectify its mistake, it merely shrieked in annoyance before flapping hard and flying off. It caught an updraft from the sun-heated stone of the mountain and circled skyward before disappearing above the summit of the temple.
The firekeeper spat a black gob, then said, “Here, give me a hand with this.”
It led Kratos over to the bowl and handed the Spartan its staff, leaning his nub of arm bone against the searing bowl for balance. “Poke that bugger in for me, will you?”
Kratos used the staff to shove the corpse into the bowl, reflecting that at least he’d figured out why the staff was charred at one end. “You said you open the gate.”
“It opens at my command.”
“Then do it.”
“In my own time, Spartan. You think you can conquer the Temple of the Gods? It’s never been done, you know. Sooner or later, the harpies will bring what’s left of you back for me to burn. If I were you, I’d leave now.”
“I will leave,” Kratos said, “when I have the box.”
“And luck to you on that.” The decrepit undead chuckled. “You want water? Food? Armor? There’s not much,
