He took a moment to search the shattered hulk on which he stood, seeking a cask, a tub, anything that might have been watertight. Even an upturned bucket might have captured enough rainwater to slake his burning thirst, but there was not the tiniest drop to be found, either on the deck or in the one lower hold he could still reach. Then he saw the barrel near the rudder, water for the steersman. Kratos strode to it and thrust his head into the water to drink deeply.
He jerked back and spat, bile rising into his throat. Brackish water burned his mouth. He spat again, this time adding a curse.
“May the oceans turn to dust! It could taste no worse than this!”
But as these words left his lips, an eldritch light shimmered up from the invisible depths of the drowned hold in which he stood. Where before there had been only a stained and rotting bulkhead now stood an archway of alabaster and pearl, twice Kratos’s height and wider than he could span with his arms. That archway framed a vast face, bright as sun flash on a calm sea, the face of a man whose beard was sea foam and whose hair was braided with gleaming black kelp.
“Do you have so little regard for my domain, Kratos?” The tolerantly chiding voice boomed like a tidal surge blasting into a cave-pocked cliff. “Ten years have you sailed my seas on your quests, without shipwreck or storm founder-is that not evidence of my regard for you?”
“Lord Poseidon.” Kratos’s tone was respectful, but he did not bow his head. “How may I serve the King of the Ocean?”
“This Hydra that plagues my beautiful Aegean is a creature of your onetime master, Ares. Its existence is an insult. I would have you destroy it.”
“I plan to.”
“ Know that thus far you have but scratched this monstrosity-its secondary heads, such as those you’ve destroyed, are without number. The Hydra barely notices their loss.”
“Then how do I kill it?”
“You must destroy the master head-the one that holds the creature’s brain. The master head is ten times the size of the others, and its might is near to limitless.”
Kratos didn’t care about its might. “How do I find it?”
“I will take you there. And to help you in your task, I will lend you a tiny fraction of my own power.”
Kratos had a feeling that the sea god wouldn’t look kindly upon refusal. “What sort of power?”
“You know how my anger causes the earth to shake, and my fury spawns sea storms no ship can survive. Step forward into the archway where you see the image of my face, and I will grant you power beyond any you’ve ever known-you will command a fragment of my rage.”
Whatever Poseidon’s Rage might be, it couldn’t hurt any more than having the chains of the Blades of Chaos burned into his arms.
“All right,” he said. “Let us kill this beast.”
– -
STEPPING INTO THE ARCHWAY brought a blinding flash and the sensation of his bones being on fire, burning him from the inside out. Stepping out through the far side dropped Kratos into dank gloom that smelled of sweat and urine. The slow roll of the floor told him he was still aboard a ship. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could make out the shapes of what appeared to be cargo lashed into place on either side. From ahead, he heard a sobbing voice-a man, crying like a child, begging to be set free.
Kratos moved toward the mouth of the gangway in a battle-ready crouch. Screams came from above, and he suspected that the sea god had been as good as his word. Light gathered in an archway ahead, and as he approached it, he discovered that what had in the gloom appeared to be cargo was, in fact, people-people too sick or starved or thirsty to even move.
In the new light, Kratos saw the greenish gleam of bronze shackles on these people’s ankles, and he revised his own revision. These people were cargo.
It was a slave ship.
Kratos nodded to himself; slaves meant there would definitely be fresh water nearby-slaves were too valuable to be allowed to die of thirst. Some of them managed to rouse themselves enough to beg him for mercy as he passed. Kratos ignored them. Near the archway, a slave was bound in some kind of punishment position-his wrists were shackled together and hung from a short chain affixed to the ceiling. The chain was just long enough that his toes brushed the deck as the ship rolled. He sobbed in a thready, broken voice, “Please… please don’t leave me here… please…”
As Kratos moved toward him, the slave’s sobbing turned to screams. “By all the gods, I beg you… please!”
Kratos came to a stop beside him. “If I help, will you keep quiet?”
“Oh, bless you-all the gods bless you for a good and kind…” The slave’s voice trailed away as he finally managed to focus his eyes on his presumed rescuer. “You!” His voice was choked with awe. “The Ghost of Sparta-I know who you are! I know what you did! I’d rather die right here than be saved by you!”
Kratos drew one of the Blades of Chaos and, with a businesslike flick of the wrist, slashed off the slave’s head. “Your prayer is granted.”
The slave had been so close to death already that the blade channeled only the faintest spark of life up the chains. Kratos glanced back into the slave hold, weighing the prospect of gaining more strength and healing himself by slaughtering them all-but they were so sickly that killing them would be more trouble than their lives were worth.
Kratos moved on. Beyond the slave hold stretched a broad companionway lined with doors. The screams from above were thinning already, and a chorus of thunderous roars that caused the whole ship to shiver warned him there was more than one Hydra head up there. Whoever was fighting them sounded as if they were losing. Kratos looked around for someone else to kill on his way up; he needed all the energy he could get.
The pair of doors near the end of the companionway were different from the others. Massively timbered and bound with black iron, they looked strong enough that even Kratos might have trouble breaking them down-and as he considered this, the blade chains began to warm, sparking with not-unpleasant stings. He drew one blade and pushed it toward the door before him. A brilliant shower of energy splashed over the door, and the blade never reached the timbers. The energy flickered longest around a deep slot in one timber-a lock. A magical lock.
Kratos nodded to himself. So: a pair of doors not only strong as a fortress but sealed with magical bindings and mystic locks and who knew what else. What sort of “treasures” might a slave ship’s captain keep within such a vault? Something beyond tawdry gold must be secure behind this door. Whatever it was, it might prove useful.
THE MAIN DECK LOOKED like a slaughterhouse where the butchery was still going on. Everywhere Kratos turned, sailors struggled with undead legionnaires or tried to fend off Hydra heads with long spears. Every timber on the ship was slick with blood, smeared with rotting undead flesh, or both. This stench-filled abattoir of screams and panic and desperation took him back to his younger days, to the raids on which he’d led his Spartan companions, in the long-ago time before he’d sworn himself to the service of Ares.
Of course, there hadn’t been quite so many undead soldiers back then. And the Hydra had been only a Spartan bedtime story-because even though Hercules was, through an accident of birth, merely Theban, he had also made himself a hero of Sparta by restoring its rightful king, Tyndareus.
Kratos moved out onto the deck, Blades of Chaos at the ready. The undead he simply ignored; the sailors would either handle them or provide enough diversion to keep them busy. Kratos had eyes only for the three heads of the Hydra that attacked this ship as a team.
The smaller heads to either side were still twice the size of any he had yet fought-and they were dwarfed by the inconceivable majesty of the master head. Rising on a sinuous neck higher than the ship’s mainmast, the master head was large enough to swallow the ship whole in a single gulp, and its eyes burned with a lurid yellow inner light. The secondary heads weaved and struck like vipers, keeping the spear-armed sailors at bay.
“Er-you a god?” The voice came from behind him. “Y’look kinda like a god. We could use a god.”
Kratos turned. Crouched behind a wheel coiled with anchor chain, a sailor peered at him through one good eye; his other was an empty socket bisected with a scar reminiscent of the one through Kratos’s eyebrow. The sailor’s remaining eye drifted about as though he couldn’t decide where to look.
“Your captain,” Kratos said. “Where is he?”
“Whatcha want with him anyways?”
