“A love bite, my dearest,” came her cooing words. “You like it. You want me to give you more, many more!”
He felt blood running down his chest from the neck wound, but he knew she loved him-and he desired her above all others.
Even above Aphrodite’s twin daughters. Even more than Lora and He pulled back, struggling in the warm embrace of a woman he treasured.
“No,” he said. “I can’t…” His ears filled with song, shrill at first and then so melodious that he wept. His lover sang for him. She sang a haunting song of love and desire. For him and him alone.
“Another love peck,” she said.
Again he recoiled as blood spewed from the other side of his neck.
Blood, blood spilled in battle, not in a lover’s tryst- He straightened his arms and shoved hard. The Siren let out a screech of pure rage, momentarily breaking the spell. Kratos saw the Siren for what she was, and then she sang to him. Sang a melody so lovely and beguiling he knew she wanted him above all others in the world.
But she is not my wife… my wife and daughter… Those memories hammered at Kratos’s mind even as he felt more love bites. The pain offset the pleasure. He had known pain, so much pain, and he concentrated on it. And his wife. And his daughter lying dead at his feet Again he pushed away, but this time he heard other voices.
“Share! You are greedy!”
“Hungry! We’re all hungry. You must give him to us!”
The voices turned strident, and the lovely, loving melody faded in his ears.
My wife! My daughter!
Kratos lifted his hand and felt energy flow. The Thunderbolt of Zeus built… but against his lover, his lovely, caring lover. He couldn’t. Not this way…
The cacophony of demands to dine on his flesh grew as the Siren’s song diminished. Kratos reached down deep within, the visions-the nightmares-powering his determination. The thunderbolt erupted from his palm. A force greater than anything he had ever felt lifted him from his feet and threw him high into the air, spinning, turning, and tumbling. He crashed into the sand, dazed. When he looked up, he saw Sirens scattered about, lifeless.
He shook himself and stood, aware that he had destroyed only a few of the creatures with the power of Zeus. Three other Sirens rushed toward him. Kratos had never seen creatures so lovely or loving-but he did not fall under their spell. Within a moment he understood why.
The Sirens had begun to fight over him. His hand went to his neck and found fresh bite marks, all bleeding freely. His nightmarish vision had allowed him to break their spell to fight, and when he had blown them apart with Zeus’s lightning, the thunder had partially deafened him. He might not have the beeswax that Odysseus carried, but he had a makeshift method of temporarily blocking the Sirens’ call. His hearing was already returning, though-had he waited too long?
He raised his right hand again, but his body betrayed him. His hand trembled, rebellious flesh refusing to grasp the lightning. The Sirens soothed and cajoled him to relax, not to use his weapon. They loved him. He wanted them more than he’d ever wanted anything.
A final twist of his will curled his fingers into the proper form, but his weakened arm could no longer hold his hand upraised. It fell to his side, and the thunderbolt in his grip blasted the sand in front of him to glass. The thunderclap and shock wave staggered him. Two steps back, three. He launched another thunderbolt. Again came the blast-but this time he could barely hear it.
“Well, all right, then,” he did not hear himself say. He set out toward the desert monsters at a walk-with purpose but without haste. The Sirens drifted back from him, exchanging glances that seemed to cry, “How can this mortal resist our power?” Suddenly the Sirens were uncertain that Kratos was human at all. They howled at him, pitching their voices in various harmonics-one chord could set a man afire, another could blind him, still a third could cause his skull to explode like a chestnut in a bonfire.
Kratos kept walking. He didn’t even bother to draw the blades.
The Sirens spread out as though to encircle him. But Kratos had dealt with Sirens before-and these Sirens, to their misfortune, had never dealt with Kratos.
They had never seen Kratos move faster than a walk, and they had no idea just how swiftly those powerful legs could drive his massive body. He allowed them to close in around him until he judged they were near enough, then, in a blindingly swift uncoiling of his mighty thighs, he sprang at one of the Sirens the way a tiger pounces on a goat.
With one great hand, he seized the Siren’s long, flowing hair, while with the other he punched her in the chest so hard that her sternum and clavicles shattered and ripped the upper part of her spine out her back.
He wrenched off her head and swung it by its hair like a flail. The nearer of the remaining two took her sister’s head square in the face, hard enough to shatter every monstrous bone in her skull and drop her dead on the sand. The last Siren turned to flee, but Kratos whipped the remains of the first Siren’s head around his own and hurled it like a throwing hammer. The severed head struck the fleeing Siren between the shoulder blades, hard enough to shatter her spine. Splinters of bone shredded her lungs, which put a stop to her hideous keening cry.
Kratos stood over the dying Siren for a moment, with nothing resembling pity on his face. He crushed her head with a stomp of his sandal.
He hurried up the steps into the razed structure. Oddly, though the place appeared to be a ruin, the stairways and corridors were all lined with burning lamps, so he had not the slightest difficulty seeing his way. He followed the light…
… and eventually burst out into daylight again, on a balcony of dizzying height, looking upon the endless sandstorm raging across the Desert of Lost Souls. Kratos paused to examine crude reliefs carved on the walls to either side. One depicted gods appearing before Pathos Verdes III, commanding him to build a mighty temple to house the greatest weapon on earth or Olympus. The other showed the temple being chained to the back of Cronos-a disrespectful way for Zeus to treat his own father, even if Cronos had tried to eat Zeus as soon as the future king was born. Chained to the stone at the far lip of the balcony stood a horn larger than Kratos’s whole body. Curious carvings raked backward along the length of the horn; precious jewels rimmed its far end. Heavy chains fastened the horn into place at the edge of the balcony. Kratos went to the smaller end of the great horn, put his lips to it, and blew.
A mighty blast roared from the horn’s opposite end, harrowing apart the swirling desert sands before Kratos and somehow holding them at bay to open a path before him. Far in the distance along this path, he glimpsed another structure, a grander and more curious one. As he squinted at it, trying to make out details, that mighty temple began to move toward him. Kratos sucked in his breath as he saw Cronos arch and cause the Temple of Pandora chained to his back to shake and rumble. Then the Titan, on hands and knees, turned and passed close to the edge of the balcony where Kratos watched.
Kratos had no time to think. He reacted. A heavy chain dangling from the Titan’s side swept past. With a powerful leap, Kratos launched himself into the air. His fingers closed about the chain, and then he was whipped about as Cronos changed direction and plunged back into the depths of the sea of sand.
SIXTEEN
HANDS BLOODIED AND ACHING, Kratos finally reached the top of the Titan’s mountainous side. For three long days he had climbed-and for the whole of the most recent day he had no longer been scaling Cronos’s hide but instead chipping his way up the mountain chained to Cronos’s back. He had lashed himself to the Titan’s side and slept fitfully several times, but on the long, long rock climb he had pushed upward without true rest. Worse was the lack of food and water as he worked ever higher on the vast Titan. When he had begun, Kratos thought the Titan moved slowly, but the higher he climbed on the side, the more he realized that Cronos sped along. Even though he crawled on hands and knees, each motion was so huge that the wind of his passage had very nearly stripped Kratos from his side more than once.