God of War

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  “You should have killed me,” Kratos growled. “My weakness dishonored Sparta—and all the world would be better today if I had died on that field.”

  “Your Spartan honor means nothing to me. You begged. I answered. I arose from my bed on Olympus and descended upon that field to dry your tears. To fight your battle for you. To win where you had lost. To triumph where you had failed.”

  The god lifted one house-size foot, as if to crush Kratos like an ant beneath his sandal. Kratos tried to dive out of the way, but the god was as fast as he was huge. The sandal pinned Kratos facedown to the ground. Kratos tasted dirt and blood, and in that second he saw himself again, battered to the bloody earth by the immense war mallet of the barbarian king. He heard his voice cry out to Ares and swear eternal servitude.

  “Do you remember what you said to me that day? The price you set for your worthless survival? Say it now, Kratos. Say it.”

  The pressure of the vast sandal crushing his back increased. Kratos felt his ribs cracking, and he could no longer draw a breath.

  And he heard in his memory the words he had spoken on that day.

  My life is yours, Lord Ares. I swear it.

  But here and now he could not make his lips form the words. He tried—he did try, telling himself that nine little words meant nothing, that to give the god his petty victory would mean Kratos might yet have another chance to recover Pandora’s Box and face the blood-mad Olympian on equal terms—but the words would not come out.

  He couldn’t even truly think them.

  The room and the crushing weight of the god all vanished behind the visions, the waking nightmares that had turned his life to an ocean of blood and suffering.

  He had served Ares not only with his sword arm but with his whole heart, his mind, and every scrap of his gift for unstoppable brutality.

  THE ARMY OF SPARTA became invincible. Opposing warriors quaked in fear to see Kratos’s Spartans take the field; at the first javelin cast, they dropped their weapons and ran home to tremble behind their mothers’ skirts. The Fist of Ares gave no quarter. Fleeing soldiers would be cut down, to a man. Parties suing for peace were brutally slaughtered. All the world trembled before the battle cry of the Spartans when Kratos stood at their head.

  No quarter. No prisoners. No mercy.

  Many were the princes who pled with Kratos to accept their surrender, to save a remnant of their army and their city, even if it meant slavery in a Spartan kitchen. He refused to hear such pleas. Surrender was never granted. Victory or death in battle were the only acceptable outcomes—Kratos expected no less from his own soldiers.

  Kratos told his soldiers that he killed because Ares commanded him—but in truth he killed for his own pleasure. He killed because slaughter was his gift. His passion. Because he loved nothing more than the smell of blood, the screams of the dying, the sight of an army of corpses rotting on the battlefield.

  “AND IF THAT WERE TRUE,” rumbled the god who now held him pinned in the arena, “you would still be the Fist of Ares on earth, and the world would still quake at the merest rumor of Sparta marching out to war. It was because you did not love me enough, Kratos. Because your heart still held close your—”

  “No …” Kratos croaked out with the last of his voice. “No …”

  The visions took him wholly now: He saw himself on the very last night he had served the God of War.

  “THE VILLAGERS PRESUME to kneel first before Athena! Before Athena! This place is an affront to Ares! Burn it to the ground!”

  Kratos grabbed a torch and sent it spinning through the night to land atop a thatched roof. The tiny sparks became a fire and then the entire roof collapsed, devouring the hut in minutes.

  With a battle cry, Kratos led his horde of savage murderers into the village. The few villagers coming out to defend their homes were armed with shovels and planting sticks, without hope of resistance against his battle-hardened warriors. Kratos strode through the mêlée, hacking and slashing, killing without effort, without even really noticing whom he might be slaying … until he came to the village temple.

  The Temple of Athena. And the wizened, age-crabbed old witch of an oracle who thought to bar his passage …

  A knot formed in his belly. The stench of burning meat combined with wood and thatch as house after house was reduced to cinders. The temple looked deserted. But some dark foreboding gave Kratos pause….

  But …

  It was a shrine to Athena. Its existence was the reason for this massacre. How could he leave it standing?

  “Everyone out!” he shouted, rapping hard on the thick wood door with the pommel of his sword. When no one answered, he stepped back and used the Blades of Chaos to reduce the door to splinters. A small, hunched-over Nubian woman shuffled out. She wore a shining green gown marked with the letter omega on the front.

  “Sacrilege,” she said, shaking her finger at him. “Beware of blaspheming ’gainst the goddess, Kratos! Do not enter this place!”

  Kratos backhanded the old woman, knocking her to the ground. “Never presume to give a Spartan orders.”

  He kicked open the door and rushed into the temple. Two priests came toward him. The Blades of Chaos flashed and delivered fiery death to both men. Kratos roared in rage when other supplicants in the temple stirred. He rushed forward, not needing to even see his victims as he cut left, right, left, and then plunged ahead. There was no thought of restraint, no need for caution; there was only blood and death and triumph, Kratos in his element … and so he did not heed the last of his victims, and he did not hesitate to slaughter the last two supplicants in the village temple: a woman, and her young daughter …

  THE TERRIBLE SHOCK of what he had done shattered the vision and brought him back to the temple arena where the god now crushed out his life. But at that instant, miraculously, the weight on his back vanished. Ares had lifted his foot away and once more returned to the center of the huge arena.

  “Come on, you contemptible nothing, you insane murderer! You wanted to fight—let’s fight!”

  Kratos picked himself up from the floor and shook the fog out of his head. The foot that the god had lowered upon his back had been the same one he’d stabbed with Artemis’s sword. He saw clearly the gouge left in the stone by the magical blade as it had spiked down through godly flesh ….

  But that gouge in the floor was dry as the Desert of Lost Souls outside.

  There was no blood.

  Kratos looked at the wall behind him, at the smear of shadows he cast in the light of the ubiquitous braziers. He looked at the wall beyond Ares, where the god’s gargantuan form cast no shadows at all.

  Ares wasn’t Ares. The god wasn’t real.

  “I am real enough to break you, Spartan. You want to kill me? Come on and try, you miserable mortal!”

  Kratos’s ribs still ached with the memory of the god’s sandal crushing him to the floor; blood still trickled from a gash on his skull where his skin had split under the impact of the flat of Ares’s blade. Though it seemed Kratos could not harm this Ares, the reverse clearly did not apply.

  “Why do you wait? Do you realize now how hopeless it is to try to kill a god?”

  Kratos did want to kill Ares. His lust for the god’s blood burned like sun fire in his veins. But this was not Ares. No wonder the god seemed to be reading his mind—t his phantasmal “god” was itself a product of his mind.

  Like the barbarian king in his visions.

  Like his nightmares of his wife and his daughter.

  To destroy this phantom Ares, Kratos would have to be strong enough to prevail against his own mind—but if he had such strength, he would never have needed to take service under Athena in the first place. He would have been strong enough to conquer his nightmares—to banish the memories of his crime—on his own. But he didn’t have that strength. He knew it. For ten years he’d labored to silence the voices in his head, to blind the eye of his memory. This phantasmal Ares was a foe he could never defeat until he conq
uered himself.

  Kratos backed away.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  AS DAWN CARESSED the eastern desert with her rose-red fingers, Kratos stood on the roof of a huge building atop a mountain—the mountain that grew from the midst of the Temple of Pandora, which itself was built up from the mountain chained to the back of the laboring Titan who bore it on his eternal crawl through the Desert of Lost Souls.

  And in the first gleam of Helios’s chariot on the far horizon, three huge figures around him shone and shimmered: statues, hundreds of feet tall, of the Brother Kings. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades stood facing one another, and the hands of all three were extended to support a disk the size of a marching field with a hole in the middle, like a wagon wheel of the same material as the statues themselves. This material—some mystical substance more transparent than glass—reflected the glints and highlights thrown off by the statues’ curves. Below where the golden chariot had yet to touch, the Brother Kings were wholly invisible.

  Kratos trotted toward them. Athena had said the box rested at the summit of the temple, and obviously nothing stood higher than these. But when he reached them, their bases on the dawn-shadowed roof were not only invisible, they were insubstantial—as though the statues did not exist except in the light of dawn.

  Kratos scowled upward at the images of the gods. His opportunity to reach the treasure they supported would last only as long as the dawn itself.

  Zeus stood to the east, and so more of his statue was exposed to the dawn light. Kratos sprang to the figure of the King of Olympus and leaped high to see if he could touch the statue where the dawn struck it. At the top of his leap, he felt a surface warm and solid but more slippery than oiled glass. He drew one of the blades and leaped again to strike the statue. The only effect his blade could produce was to make the immense statue ring like a great crystal bell. Not so much as a scratch marred the nearly invisible surface.

  But instead of fading like a sounding bell, this ring deepened and broadened, becoming louder and louder until Kratos had to clap hands over his ears against the growing pain. Poseidon’s statue was the next closest to the eastern edge of the roof. Kratos ran to it, steeling himself for the blast of sound he knew would come when he took his hands from his ears, then leaped into the dawn light and struck Poseidon, too, with a powerful blow from a Blade of Chaos.

  The belling that rose was deeper, more resonant, and grew in power more swiftly than had the sound from Zeus. Farthest from the rise of dawn—appropriately enough, thought Kratos—stood Hades, King of the Underworld. And this note sparked by Kratos’s blow was darker and deeper still. The volume of their conjoined chord rose until it seemed to Kratos that there was nothing in the world except sound.

  Hands over his ears did him no further good. He staggered to the central point between the three statues and fell to his knees. As the rising sun finally struck the spot where he huddled, what had been featureless stone became a magically clear window. Directly below him, he saw the chamber of the Architect, with its throne, on which the armored figure sat as though oblivious to the universe-destroying sonic blast from above.

  This disk felt to be the same sort of substance as the statues, which his best effort had not managed to even scratch. Now that he thought of it, though, he recalled a tale of the great brass gong of Rhodes; it was said to ring so powerfully that it shattered glass for a league or farther. Since it seemed as if much more of this noise would do the same to his skull, Kratos decided there could be no harm in trying. He reached down to the transparent disk and rapped it sharply, once, with his knuckle.

  The disk instantly shattered with a sharp report, scattering shards so tiny as to become dancing motes of dust. The awful sound fell to instant silence. Kratos plummeted through the hole like a stone down a well.

  A convulsive wrench of his body twisted him enough in the air that he could catch himself by straddling the Architect, one foot on either arm of the throne.

  The throne began to rotate, with much grinding and clattering of gears. Kratos sprang from the arms to the dais on which the throne rested. The rotation stopped.

  “So, Architect,” Kratos said. “You foretold my death, yet here I am.”

  The Corinthian helmet turned just enough that Kratos could see cold green fire through the eye slits. “No man has ever survived the Arena of Remembrance.”

  “Until now.”

  “But Pandora’s Box will never be yours.”

  The Architect raised an armored finger, and the lid of the box on his lap slid open. Kratos seized the Architect’s wrist in a grip no mortal being could break. The armor was shockingly warm.

  “No more tricks,” Kratos said. “Tell me how to reach the box, and I will let you live.”

  “You will not, for I am not.”

  Kratos tightened his grip on the Architect’s wrist until the armor buckled under his fingers. “You’re alive enough to speak, so you’re alive enough to suffer.”

  “Do as you will.”

  Kratos snarled and clenched his fist. The armor crumpled like a dry leaf, but from his crushing grasp, no blood flowed—only steam, hot enough to scald Kratos’s hand. With a curse, Kratos wrenched on the arm, and it tore away at the shoulder. From the severed joint hissed another burst of steam, which faded away as a metal plate within the armor slid into place over the hole.

  Kratos scowled down into the armor—empty of flesh or bone, containing only brass tubing and gears of unfamiliar design. “What manner of creature are you?”

  “I am,” said the voice, which Kratos now noted seemed to come from beneath the dais rather than from the helmet, “what remains of the Architect. I am his final device.”

  Kratos’s eyes widened. “The Antikythera …”

  “I control the temple. I am the keeper of its final challenge. Look into the box on my lap.”

  Kratos stepped closer and peered into the device filled with a multitude of tiny rods—needles, Kratos realized—set on end and packed together. Here and there some of these needles were depressed to one height or another; the depressions were exactly the diameter of the armored fingers in the empty gauntlet in Kratos’s hand. He guessed their height and conformation somehow controlled the various mechanisms throughout the temple. There were also needles mounted horizontally on all four walls.

  “Press them. Anywhere.”

  Kratos considered this. There could easily be more going on in this box than just the needles, and those were discolored at their tips. Poison? What poison could still kill after a thousand years?

  If anyone would have known the answer to that question, it would have been the Architect.

  Instead of his own finger, Kratos used the armored finger of the gauntlet he held. Instantly, the horizontal needles licked out from the walls and stabbed the finger of the gauntlet. Rebounding from the bronze, the needles returned to their places.

  “Had you pressed with your own finger, your hand would be trapped—pinned in place by the needles, and you would be dying, in tremendous pain, from the blood of the Lernaen Hydra that paints every tip.”

  “So? I must guess the shape that will reveal Pandora’s Box?”

  “No,” the Architect—or, rather, the Antikythera—replied. “I will tell you: It is the shape of a man’s face, pressed into the needles.”

  Kratos thought about the many statues and reliefs throughout the temple—surely the head of a man-sized statue …

  “The face must be of flesh. The needles must drive fully in and remain in place,” the emotionless voice said. “To reach Pandora’s Box, a man must die.”

  Kratos thought of the man in the cage; for one brief moment, he regretted having killed the old fool.

  “And this is your only chance. This conformation of the needles will work only for a tiny span after the window above is shattered. Once the Chariot of Helios rules the sky, the statues—and the box on the disk they bear—will vanish into the noonday light. Only you have reached this far. No one to follow will have a cha
nce at all.”

  Kratos nodded. He appreciated the elegant intricacy of this final trap. He said, “But you always—that is, the Architect, your creator—leave one way through.”

  “Until now.”

  Kratos squinted up at the disk supported by the hands of the Brother Kings, far above in the shining sun. He now saw a speck upon it, and his heart swelled with rage. He had not come so far to be denied. Here, where he could see the box, he would not allow himself to fail.

  “Athena herself has told me that there is no way out of this temple without Pandora’s Box,” he said. “So I will die here, in success, or die later for my failure.”

  “You are about to die.”

  “Since I am about to die, there is no further need for secrets, is there?” Kratos said. “Tell me why this temple was designed in this way—tell me why each trap, maze, and puzzle has a solution? Why design fantastical defenses around the most powerful weapon in creation—but deliberately design each of them with a hole?”

  “Because Zeus commanded it so.”

  “Zeus?” Kratos frowned. “But why?”

  “I am a loyal servant of the gods. I do not question. I obey.”

  The logic was obvious: Zeus commanded that every puzzle have an answer, every trap an escape, and the Architect was fanatically loyal. Which could only mean that this final deadly puzzle was no different from the others.

  The Architect had placed his sons in coffins. At Zeus’s bidding? Their heads had proven to be the key to gaining entry to progressively dangerous challenges. Twice this had happened. Twice. Would the Architect so misuse his children unless….

  “One last question.”

  “Your time is growing short.”

  “I know,” Kratos said, thinking, So is yours. “My final question: How can a mere device, a steam-powered mechanism, no matter how cleverly designed, understand and respond to whatever I say?”

  Without waiting for a reply, Kratos sprang to the rear of the throne with pantherish agility and seized with both hands the Corinthian helmet that rested upon the armored shoulders. It seemed to be more firmly anchored than the arm had been. Kratos had to twist fiercely and wrench upward with all his strength to rip it free. Then he tucked the helmet under one arm and reached inside with his other hand, scooping out what he found as he would a snail from its shell.