Robert Vardeman - God of War

When the Hydra began to toss its head around, shaking Kratos like a rat caught in a hunting dog’s jaws, Kratos saw his opportunity. A kick from Kratos could rock a warship away from its dock. He doubled up, bringing his knees under his pinioned arms. When his greaves and sandals began to tear at the Hydra’s face, the creature could only growl in pain and rage.

Kratos kicked harder, faster. Desperation drove him now. His arms turned cold, numb, bloodless. Both feet worked as if he were pummeling the beast with his fists. A chance kick caught the Hydra’s eye, causing the creature’s growl to become a roar of pain that released Kratos’s arms and sent him flipping upward, high into the air. As Kratos reached the top of his arc, the Hydra strained toward him, opening wide its maw to catch him like a casually tossed sweetmeat.

In a single instant, Kratos both feared and exulted.

As he fell, he returned the Blades of Chaos in one smooth motion to rest upon his back. He coiled himself into a tight ball and allowed the creature’s mouth to slam shut around him-but before it could swallow, he planted his feet against the Hydra’s lower jaw, braced his back against the slimy ridges of the vast hard palate above, and shoved.

The creature’s jaw began to open. Kratos strained like Hercules lifting the sky from the shoulders of Atlas. The Hydra strove with all its monstrous power to bite down again, but when the Ghost of Sparta stood braced, no power on earth could crush him.

Once he had forced his legs to full extension, Kratos wedged his hands in above his shoulders and continued to force open the Hydra’s mouth by strength of his mighty arms alone. A crack like the breaking of a main spar came from the hinge of the monster’s jaw, but Kratos did not relent and could not be denied. Fear was gone, replaced with cold triumph. With one great surge, he blasted his arms up straight above his head, and now the sound was not so much a crack as a crushing, grinding roar and a wet, leathery r-r-rip as the Hydra’s jaw shattered and its cheeks tore asunder.

The Hydra shuddered and released an ear-shattering bellow, and Kratos kicked himself free, leaping for the deck of the nearest ship. The endless neck and giant destroyed head slid back down into the Aegean’s dark waters, which now churned and boiled even more, as the voracious sharks circling below got a taste of the Hydra’s blood. The last Kratos saw, sharks were darting like crows into the Hydra’s mouth, ripping out gory chucks of its flapping tongue. To them it mattered not if the flesh they dined on was human or monster. Ravenously, they tore at the Hydra’s face, dragging it below the roiling surface.

Yet even that immense head was not enough for all the sharks. Hundreds-thousands!-circled endlessly, thrashing the sea with their tails as each hoped for its own meal.

Kratos would be happy to provide that for his unwitting allies. At his feet, his blood tinged the water that ran down his legs. Hooking a shark or two on the barbs of the Blades of Chaos would steal enough life to close these minor cuts. He seized the railing and pulled himself up the canted remnant of deck-but as he drew the blades, the circling sharks sped away. They had discovered a feast of their own.

Literally.

Everywhere he looked, sharks floated, their black eyes fixed and staring. Some were beginning to bloat and others had their entrails blown out, and even the sharks that swarmed these dead ones to strike their poisoned flesh soon were showing their own bellies to the sky.

Eating a Hydra was just as fatal as being eaten by one.

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…”