Robert Vardeman - God of War

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?”

“His surrender.” Kratos cast a scornful eye about the carnage on deck. “This is my ship now. How do you call it?”

“The Gods’ Lament,” came the answer. “You think you can take her?”

“I already have,” Kratos said. “It will be called Vengeance, and it is mine.”

“May the gods smile on that-if they don’t strike you down for hubris!”

Kratos squinted down at the sailor. Was the man mad? Who would dare to question the Ghost of Sparta to his face? Then he took in the sailor’s filthy tunic and the empty purple-stained wineskin on the deck beside him and realized that the man was too drunk to actually see him.

“Your captain,” Kratos repeated. “I won’t ask you again.”

The drunken sailor waved a trembling hand. “Over there. By the mast. The fella wi’ the big key round his neck. Y’see ’im?”

“The one on his knees?”

“Uh-huh. On his knees. Tha’s him.”

Kratos’s lip curled in scorn. “Begging for mercy?”

“Prrrrayin’,” the sailor corrected him. “Prayin’ to Poseidon… t’ save the ship from the Hydra…”

“His prayer has been answered.”

The sailor goggled up at him. “Y’re gonna save us?”

“No, I am going to save the ship.” As Kratos turned back to the fight, the vast master head dipped toward the base of the mainmast and snapped shut upon the kneeling captain. In an instant, the captain was gone-s wallowed alive-and his key with him. The master head reared up, unleashing a roar of triumph that blasted the ship’s sails to rags.

Kratos was undismayed. With a throat as long as the Hydra’s, swallowing could take a considerable length of time.

The three heads were too close together for him to engage them individually. If he went straight for the master head, he’d have to defend himself against attacks from both secondary heads. Going after either of the secondary heads would expose his rear or flank to the titanic jaws of the master. If he couldn’t take them one at a time, he’d kill them all at once.

He launched himself across the deck as if he’d been shot from a ballista.

The nearest head swept toward him as though to batter him right off the deck. Kratos overleaped the monster’s neck, slashing down with one of the blades. It chopped into bone and wedged itself at the joining of the skull and one horn; the chain snapped tight as a towline and yanked Kratos sideways into a whirl. He let the head’s swing wrap the chain all the way around its neck, leaving him standing on the top of its skull. Faster than thought, the other blade found his hand, then together they thrust deep into the head’s eyes. Accurate slashes painted the blade with a gooey mass of vitreous humor and sent the head reeling blindly.

A looming shadow gathered inky darkness around him. The master head arrowed downward like a falcon the size of a house. Kratos stood and waited. The vast jaws of the master head gaped far too wide to pluck him off the secondary head with any sort of accuracy-especially since the secondary head was still whipping from side to side, faster and faster as it tried to shake Kratos off-and so the master head did exactly as Kratos had anticipated.

Those gargantuan jaws closed around the entire secondary head, and teeth like the ram spike of a war galley chopped into the armored scales of the neck, trying to bite off the secondary head and swallow it-and Kratos-whole.

But Kratos knew well how tough the scaly hide of the Hydra truly was. There was ample time for him to slip between the great teeth as the master head bit down and began to shake his head like a wolf worrying off the haunch of a deer. Kratos jammed one of the blades into the master’s lower gums, then used the chain to swing himself under the creature’s chin. There, he hacked into the scales with the second blade, while ripping the first one free. The master head roared at the sudden pain, releasing the half-chewed secondary head to collapse back into the sea.