The spar on which he balanced rolled unexpectedly beneath him. Without hesitation he leaped, fingers scrabbling for the hulk’s encrusted anchor chain. Barnacles slashed his fingers, but he only snarled and gripped so much the harder. His feet met the curve of the hull, and he carefully walked his way up, pulling himself along the chain. He swung himself up onto the deck.
This ship had been abandoned for years. The mast had broken off and left jagged splinters, now dulled by storm and wave. He turned and looked back to where his ship had been. He found naught but steel-gray chop and foam nearly as white as his ash-stained skin.
The stench of black decay was his first warning. His second was the sudden red-hot sear from the chains fused to the bones of his wrists. Ares had been a cruel master; Kratos hated even the thought of him, save for one single act. Ares had joined to his arms the Blades of Chaos.
The embedded chains burned now as though they hung in a bonfire. Flame dripped from the blades on his back, but again he didn’t bother to draw. He turned and dropped into a fighting stance, hands wide to grapple and rip. The stench gained putrid strength as its source climbed into view.
That source was three of Ares’s soldiers-rotting corpses of undead legionnaires. These were the only soldiers the God of War could now command. Their eyes burned with a cold green fire. Decomposing flesh hung in rags from their bones. Without a sound, they rushed him.
Undead though they might be, they moved with uncanny speed. One thrust a spear at his head, thinking to force him to dodge, as another swung a length of chain at his legs.
He snatched the spear haft with both hands, driving it down to tangle the whipping chains-then Kratos released the spear and drove his hand into the slimy guts of the nearest legionnaire, his fingers ripping through the decayed flesh to seize its hipbone from the inside. Kratos squeezed with inhuman force; the legionnaire’s hip joint shattered, and the creature fell. Kratos moved on without looking back.
When the legionnaire with the chain swung it again, Kratos let it whip around his arms. He wasn’t worried; he had chains of his own.
As the undead leaped for him, Kratos slipped a loop of the blade chain around its neck. A twitch of his massive arms tore the legionnaire’s head from its shoulders. The third he dispatched with a simple blow of his fist, crushing its skull.
He looked for more creatures to destroy but saw nothing. He knew better than to believe all the monsters had disappeared.
Kratos wisely used the time he had bought himself to hunt for a pathway between the wrecked ships that might take him the last fifty-odd paces to the merchantman.
A wooden statue bobbing some distance away caught his eye.
“Athena!” He had placed her statue aboard his ship, at the prow, as tribute to the labors he had performed for the gods for the last ten years. He was unsure if the unending quests had been aided by the very gods sending him on them or if simple luck had been involved. Bad luck. Good luck. Nothing mattered. He had the blades.
That statue was hardly more than a hunk of ineptly wrought wood, no more significant than any of the flotsam throughout the Grave of Ships. Or so he had thought. Now the wooden Athena bobbed up and down on the waves, then rose three quarters of the way from the water and leaned in the direction of a tangle of floating beams.
A wetly splintering crash behind warned Kratos that more than Athena’s statue had broken free from the watery grave. He jumped, barely managing to seize a floating beam. He clawed his way onto it-and something cold and slick slid along his leg. He snarled and pulled harder, scraping his belly raw over the rough wood. He got his feet under him just as an undead hand tightened on his ankle and yanked hard.
He slammed down onto the beam and used the undead’s grip on his leg for leverage as he hauled himself around to straddle the beam, then he plunged his hands into the sea. The red-hot chains blasted water into steam and seared the legionnaire so that it jerked about wildly and withdrew without pulling him down to his death.
Kratos got his feet back under him again. Not ten yards away, the statue of Athena still bobbed on the waves. The wooden statue lifted almost free of the water and turned with unmistakable urgency, leaning like a lodestone drawn by the merchant ship.
He didn’t need another hint. He leaped and bounded, balanced and slipped and skidded across the tangle of floating beams toward a foundered ship that seemed to be relatively intact. Some of the merchantman’s crew must have sought refuge there, fleeing the Hydra’s assault; boarding planks, anchored at the merchantman’s rail, spanned the small gap between the ships. If he could only reach the foundered one, he could board the merchant ship with ease-but before he could reach the rail, the sea exploded before him.
Up from the invisible depths rose a vast reptilian head with eyes like shields of flame and gleaming swords for teeth. Its jaws could bite chunks from the mightiest ship on the Aegean; its spiny ears swung wider than a galley’s sails; from its nostrils poured a choking frigid smoke. It ignored the ships behind it, staring instead down at Kratos. Its immense neck arched, and its eyes blazed, and it roared down upon the Ghost of Sparta with a sound too vast to be called noise. The stark shattering thunder drove Kratos to his knees. Briefly.
Kratos rose. At last: something worth killing.
Harpies had died by his hand this day. The Hydra would be next. With grim satisfaction, he reached back and drew the Blades of Chaos.
TWO
“ZEUS, MY LORD…” Athena raised her eyes to the great Skyfather seated on his alabaster throne. The King of the Gods lounged upon his vast seat of authority, regal and at ease with the power he commanded from this high throne. “Zeus, my beloved father,” she amended. She chose to remind him in this subtle way that she was his favorite. “It matters little what Ares thinks of me. But deliberately assaulting my pet human-you personally banned that sort of behavior at Troy.”
“And Ares didn’t take that edict very seriously even then. As I recall, neither did you.”
Athena could not be so easily diverted. “Will you allow the God of Slaughter to defy your expressed will?”
“My will?” Zeus’s laugh echoed throughout the audience chamber and across Mount Olympus. “I think you have developed a personal fondness for this mortal of yours. What’s his name? Oh, yes. Kratos. Can it be you are… developing sympathy for him? A mortal?”
Athena was not so easily baited. “I listen to the supplications of my worshippers. Kratos is no different.”
“But you do care more for him than others. I see it in your eyes.”
“He is… entertaining. Nothing more.”
“I’ve enjoyed his exploits myself. Especially while he was still Ares’s tool-conquering all of Greece? His exploits were the stuff of legends. Then he had to go and ruin it all with that business in your little village temple…”
“We don’t have to dwell on that particular crime, do we, Father?”
Zeus stroked his long beard of braided clouds. “I considered stopping Kratos myself more than once, but I…” His rumbling voice died as he gazed into some invisible distance, lost in contemplation. “It never quite seemed the right time.”
“He’s not the one who needs stopping, Father. And you know it.” As Zeus’s favorite daughter, Athena dared speak with irreverence that might have earned any other god exile from Olympus and a fiery tumble to the earth to dodge thunderbolts for a century or two. But even for his favorite, the Skyfather’s tolerance was limited.
A hint of frown darkened his brow and brought a gray-purple tinge to the clouds of his beard and hair. Distant thunder crackled over Olympus. “Don’t presume to lecture your betters, child.”
Athena took this without so much as a flicker in her level gaze. “Would you crush a puppet because its dance offends?”
“That depends on the puppet.” A hint of fond smile touched the Skyfather’s mouth, and Athena knew the danger had passed. “And, to be sure, on the puppeteer.”
“Has Kratos not provided a consistently pleasurable diversion under my hand?” Athena was now on more certain ground. Boredom was an affliction more feared by the gods than the plague was feared by mortals below.
