Robert Vardeman - God of War

“Well…” Poseidon grumbled, the sound of waves crashing against an unprotected cliff. “I suppose that’s true. Let us put our disagreements behind us, my niece. What business brings you this day to my endless shore?”

“My lord uncle, I have come to apologize for my brother’s deadly insult to your sovereignty.”

“What?” Poseidon’s brows of sea foam drew together, and the ground beneath Athena’s feet gave a warning rumble. “Which brother?”

“Ares, of course. What other god would so boldly dare to tempt your anger?”

“Besides yourself?”

“I know of late you have been preoccupied with Atlantis-which is the sole seemly explanation for allowing Ares’s monsters to swarm your seas unchallenged.”

“Swarm my-” His gaze went distant, and what his deific vision found caused him to gasp like a sounding whale. “A Hydra? In my Grave of Ships! The impudence -I have told Zeus, again and again, he is far too lenient with his children! Ares should have spent an entire age of the world beside Sisyphus! I am not so forgiving as my brother. I will crush him! Where is he? Where?”

“Far from your realm, my lord uncle-safe in a distant desert.”

Poseidon roared, raised a fist, and all the world trembled. “Am I called Earthshaker for naught?”

“My lord uncle, please!” Athena cried. “Let not your wrath fall upon him directly! There is no shame in being bested by great Poseidon, ruler of two-thirds of all that is. No lesser god can hope to stand against any of the brother kings. If you truly want to punish Ares, you must smite his pride.”

The tremors faded away. “There is truth in this,” Poseidon admitted. “But how best to do so?”

“Show all the gods how even a mere mortal can best Ares’s plans and defeat his will,” Athena said with studied casualness.

“Yes, that is so,” Poseidon said. “But what mortal? Hercules? Isn’t he busy somewhere in Crete? Peirithous is in Hades, Theseus is old, and Perseus-who knows what he’s been up to? I don’t think he’s reliable.”

“There is another,” Athena said, forcing herself to show no hint of emotion. “Has my lord uncle heard of one particular mortal, called by men the Ghost of Sparta? His name is Kratos.”

Great Poseidon bent toward her, interested. “The Fist of Ares?”

“Fist of Ares no more-now the Ghost of Sparta serves me. Did you not attend the Challenge of War Gods?”

He nodded slowly, remembering. “Yes, yes, of course. It had slipped my mind-the fate of land-borne armies means little to the sea.”

“Kratos had forsworn his service to Ares even before I won him and the rest of the armies of humanity in the challenge.”

“Oh, yes, I remember, now that you mention it-something to do with that little village temple of yours that Kratos sacked, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, Uncle. And for Kratos, a horror beyond imagining. It haunts him to this day.”

“So this Kratos is the mortal you have in mind?”

“Your perception is justly legendary, my lord uncle. Ares hates Kratos with a passion even the gods can barely comprehend, and only a distant dream of vengeance upon the God of Slaughter keeps Kratos fighting on. There could be no greater shame for Ares than to be thwarted by Kratos.”

“How can any mere mortal hope to overpower the legions of Ares?”

“As the Fates would have it,” Athena said, a bit of a twinkle brightening the gray of her eyes, “I have an idea…”

FOR HOURS, KRATOS FOUGHT through the Grave of Ships.

The Blades of Chaos flamed in constant motion, rising and falling, whipping to the extreme lengths of their unbreakable chains, slicing through the rotting flesh and brittle yellowed bone of undead legionnaires, shattering the scales of Hydra heads, puncturing eyeballs, severing tongues and ripping at throats. They slashed and hacked, stabbed and pierced, and through it all they burned with an unnatural flame, as though the hellish fires of the Hadean forge sprang from their edges to burn away the lives of all they touched.

Kratos burned with the same fire. Each slice of any creature’s life that the Blades carved away flowed back up the chains to where they were fused with the bones of his wrists. The stolen lives charged his body and flooded his mind with inexhaustible fury. If he was not killing, it was only because he was sprinting toward more victims. He never stopped.

He never even slowed down.

The blades could not be broken; they could not be nicked or dulled. Even the black blood and putrefying flesh that should have clotted and crusted the blades and their chains simply vanished, consumed by unnatural fire. Kratos raced from ship to ship, balancing across floating beams above seas churning with the feeding frenzy of sharks below, who fought for scraps of his victims. The ships blurred together into an endless nightmare maze of decks and masts, of sails and cargo nets, and always there was the unending stream of mindless undead attacking with the same maniacal bloodlust, more harpies to swoop and dive and rake him with their shit-smeared talons.

He no longer knew if he was moving toward the merchantman he had followed into this watery hell or winding farther away. He didn’t care. He didn’t think about it or about anything at all. He threw himself into his work with the joyous abandon of a bacchant and lost himself in the purity of unchecked slaughter.

He killed. He was content.

He fought on until his path was once again blocked by another uprearing head of the Hydra. Each he faced was larger than the one before. When this great beast cracked its jaw wide to roar, Kratos might have been thrust into a tunnel with dark saliva-damp sides. All he could see was the huge mouth, gaping twice as wide as his body, and the yellowed razor-sharp teeth in front of him. He reached over his shoulders and gripped the handles of the Blades of Chaos.

The Hydra surged forward with a sinuous ripple of its seemingly endless neck. Kratos feinted, swung past the snapping teeth, and whipped the chains securing the Blades of Chaos around its thick neck. Muscles bulging with exertion, he tightened his grip, twisting the links ever tighter, strangling the creature with his chains. The monster roared in fury and whip-cracked its neck to shake him loose. The chains skidded, and the beast’s scales scraped his arms into a bloody swamp.

Kratos kicked hard, twisted, and spun around, using his chains like a climber’s belt to force his way back up the neck. But his next move came at just the wrong instant. As the monster spasmed again, the force of his own kick flipped Kratos away to swing free by the chains-and the Hydra snapped him from the air as a toad might snare an unwary fly.

The Hydra’s jaws clamped down, teeth like swords chopping into Kratos’s forearms. A different hero would have had both hands severed, but the chains fused to his bones could not be broken save by the God of War himself. Clenching its jaw tighter only chipped the monster’s teeth-but the Hydra showed no signs of letting go.

As he struggled, Kratos realized this monster might send him into Lord Hades’s embrace. Straining, he tried to pull his arms free of the Hydra’s crushing jaws, then stopped and looked frantically below into the maelstrom of the sea. Sharks snapped at one another-and at Kratos’s feet. The sharp pain of his greaves being bitten through by a huge shark forced him to fight on two fronts.

Deciding which was the more immediate threat caused a knot to form in his belly. Death beckoned from blood-crazed sharks and the Hydra.

Unable to free his arms, he lifted his legs away from the voracious sharks and tried to find leverage. Pain radiated the length of his arms, from where the Hydra’s jaws clamped down with bone-cracking force all the way up to his shoulders. Grunting with effort, he yanked-and only drove the Hydra’s teeth deeper into his forearms.