God of War

EIGHTEEN

“I KNOW THAT SWORD,” Zeus murmured as he looked into the scrying pool. “That blade is one of the most powerful weapons in all creation. How did you trick Artemis into giving it to Kratos?”

“Trick her, Father? I?” Athena shook her head. “She and Ares have reached a kind of truce-but she has seen his vicious rampage of insanity firsthand. She did not relinquish the sword lightly. I believe that she wishes to show her support by helping Kratos through the temple.”

“I’ve seen my son’s bloodlust as well,” Zeus muttered darkly. “He has burned most of Athens to the ground. Only a few buildings remain around the main square, and only the temples atop the Acropolis stand. Even your Parthenon has been blackened with soot from the fires and is falling into disrepair.”

“Most of your shrines are gone. He kills your worshippers just as he singles out mine for his brutal murders.”

“War is always messy,” Zeus said. “Ares has again refused to attend me and explain why he attacks my followers so aggressively, though. It is one thing to burn Athens to the ground, another to flaunt it in such a fashion that it offends me. Unless,” Zeus said, turning thoughtful, “his passion for war has turned into a cancer burning away at his brain.”

“He wants it for his own.” With her usual focus and determination, Athena steered the conversation back onto her course. “And Kratos, Father? Will he receive your favor?”

Zeus was uncharacteristically slow in responding. He did not look at her directly but studied her reflection in the scrying pool. “I am curious, beloved daughter. I have watched you go to considerable lengths to support and protect your pet Spartan.”

“He is the last hope of Athens.”

“Really? And yet, when you intercede with me-with the other gods as well-you never seek help for your worshippers. Or your city, only your priests. You say that Kratos is their hope-as you seem to be his-but wouldn’t your powers of persuasion and manipulation be better spent entreating direct aid? Hephaestus, for example, might have extinguished all those fires with a single wave of his hand. Apollo might have healed your wounded. I myself-”

“Yes, Father, I know. You have the right of it. As always, you see more deeply than any other.”

Athena took a deep breath and decided-in this extremity-that her cause would now, finally, be best served by the straight truth. “My Lord Father, Ares’s true target is not me, nor is it my city.”

Zeus looked at her, his thoughts veiled behind an expressionless face.

“Father, his target is your throne!”

“So your goal all along-the final truth of your endgame-has been solely to protect me?”

“Forgive my presumption,” Athena said. “I only feared that you might allow your well-known fondness for your children to cloud your judgment of Ares.”

“Or, perhaps, that my well-known fondness for my children might also cloud my judgment of you.” Zeus still showed no emotion, but Athena had heard just a hint of concern at the way Ares destroyed the shrines to Zeus throughout Athens. “You seeks only to save me from myself? Because I have forgotten the lessons of my own life?”

“All Olympus would welcome Ares’s death.”

“Would they? Or do they huddle to one side, hoping to gather whatever scraps of power remain after an Olympian patricide?”

“You condemned your own father to crawl on hands and knees through the Desert of Lost Souls for all time, rather than kill him, after you won the Titanomachy,” Athena said. “Because you know too well the consequences of family slaying family, you have decreed such will never come to pass between Olympians. But Ares may have in mind a fate similar to that of Cronos for you, Father. An eternity of torment, bound by unbreakable chains-and that is only if he can overcome his own madness enough to show self-restraint.”

“And how long have you known Ares’s ambition? How long have you been planning your brother’s death using Kratos as your instrument of destruction?”

Again, Athena told the simple truth. “Since the day that my brother tricked Kratos and drove him into my village temple in his blood frenzy. It was then I knew that Ares’s insanity had no limits, that his overweening ambition knew no bounds. What do you think he was planning for Kratos? Why give his mortal subject near-Olympian strength and toughness? Why would he affix the Blades of Chaos to Kratos’s wrists? Chaos -the primordial realm, conquered and brought to order by your grandfather Ouranos?”

She drew herself up to her full height and turned to her father. “Kratos was always meant to be the weapon that killed a god. This truth names the coldest dread my heart has ever known: The god that was to be Kratos’s victim was you, Father. Ares was grooming Kratos for the same task I am, and for the same reason: to slay a god but to avoid Gaia’s immortal curse on any who shed their family’s blood. Father, you must help Kratos! He is not the true hope of Athens-he is the hope of Olympus itself! My lord father, I have seen this future in my darkest nightmares. If Kratos falls, so falls Olympus.”

Breathless and nearly in tears, the goddess of foresight and clever stratagems had left to her only truth and love. “Father, please.”

“My edict stands. One god may not kill another.”

Athena had nothing to say.

“Kratos may reach the Arena of Remembrance and face his final challenge. But that will not be the end.”

Zeus looked grim, his beard crashing with lightning amid the thunderheads. “That, my beloved daughter, will be the beginning. Until then he has much to conquer, not the least challenge being his own nature. If he does-if he does-then I might find him worthy.”

“Worthy of what, my father?”

Zeus did not answer.