9780345508676: God of War
Softcover
ISBN 10: 034550867X ISBN 13: 9780345508676
Verlag: Random House Worlds, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Offering deeper insights into the critically acclaimed God of War® franchise, this novel returns us to the dark world of ancient Greek mythology explored in the heart-pounding action of God of War I, the bestselling video game. A brutal warrior, Kratos is a slave to the gods of Olympus. Plagued by the nightmares of his past and yearning for freedom, the Ghost of Sparta would do anything to be free of his debt to the gods. He is on the verge of losing all hope when the gods give him one last task to end his servitude.
He must destroy Ares, the god of war.
But what chance does a mere mortal have against a god? Armed with the deadly chained Blades of Chaos, guided by the goddess Athena, and driven by his own insatiable thirst for vengeance, Kratos seeks the only relic powerful enough to slay Ares . . . a quest that will take him deep into the mysterious temple borne by the Titan Cronos!
From the black depths of Hades to the war-torn city of Athens to the lost desert beyond, God of War sheds a brutal new light on the bestselling video game and on the legend of Kratos.  

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Matthew Stover is the New York Times bestselling author of the Star Wars novels Revenge of the Sith, Shatterpoint, and The New Jedi Order: Traitor, as well as Caine Black Knife, The Blade of Tyshalle, and Heroes Die. He is an expert in several martial arts. Stover lives outside Chicago.

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Chapter One


The entire ship groaned and shuddered, lurching upward into the fierce winter squall as though it had struck unexpected shoals here in the Aegean's deepest reach. Kratos threw his arms around the statue of Athena at the prow of his battered ship, lips peeling from his teeth in an animal snarl. Above, on the mainmast, the last of the ship's square sails boomed and cracked in the gale like the detonation of a nearby thunderbolt. A huge flock of filthy, emaciated creatures like hideous women with the wings of bats swooped and wheeled above the mast, screaming rage and lust for the blood of men.

"Harpies," Kratos growled. He hated harpies.

A pair of the winged monsters shrieked above the wind's howl as they dove to slash at the sail with their blood-crusted talons. The sail boomed once more, then it finally shredded, whipping over the deck and slapping the harpies from the air. One vanished into the spray of the storm; the other managed to right herself by tangling viciously sharp talons into the hair of an oarsman. She dragged the unfortunate sailor screaming and flailing into the sky, twisting to sink her fangs into his neck and feast upon his blood, which spewed downward in a gory shower.

The harpy saw Kratos watching and screamed her eternal rage. She ripped away the sailor's head and hurled it at Kratos; when he slapped this grisly missile away with a contemptuous backhand, she flung the sailor's body with enough force to kill an ordinary man.

Her target, however, was nothing resembling ordinary.

Kratos slipped aside and snatched the decapitated sailor's rope belt as the corpse plummeted. A savage yank snapped the rope and sent the corpse over the rail into the churning sea. Kratos measured the dive of the harpy as she swooped on him like a falcon, knifelike talons extended to rip out his eyes.

Kratos reached back over his shoulders instinctively, his hands seeking the twin enormous, wickedly curved, and preternaturally sharp chopping swords that nestled against his back: His signature weapons, the Blades of Chaos, had been forged by the smith god Hephaestus in the furnaces of Hades itself. Chains from their hafts looped about his wrists and burned through his flesh until they fused with his very bones-but at the last instant he left the twin weapons where they were.

A harpy wasn't worth drawing on.

He cracked the slain sailor's belt like a whip. It spun out to meet the harpy's dive and looped around her neck. He leaped from the statue to the deck below, his sudden weight wrenching the creature from the sky. He pinned her to the deck with one sandal while he hauled upward on the rope with a fraction of his full strength. That fraction was enough: The harpy's head tore free of her body and flipped into the air.

He snatched the head with his free hand, shook it at the wheeling, screeching flock above, and roared, "Come down here again! See what you get!"

He punctuated his challenge by hurling the severed head at the nearest of the harpies with deadly accuracy and incredible force. It struck her full in the face, cutting off her screech like the blow of an ax. She flipped ass over fangs as she tumbled from the sky to crash into the storm churn, three spans off the port sweeps.

Kratos only glowered. Killing those vile creatures wasn't even fun.

No challenge.

Kratos's glower deepened as the storm gave him a glimpse of the merchantman he'd been pursuing. The big ship still had two sails up and was pulling away, running before the wind. Another instant showed him why his ship was falling behind. His oarsmen were cowering in fear of the harpies, pressing themselves into whatever space they might find below their benches or shielded by the thicket of oars. With a wordless snarl, Kratos seized a panicked oarsman by the scruff of his neck and, one-handed, lifted the man up over his head.

"The only monster you should fear is me!" A quick, effortless snap of his wrist cast the coward into the waves. "Now row!"

The surviving crew applied themselves to their oars with frantic energy. The only thing Kratos hated more than harpies was a coward. "And you!" He shook a massive fist at the steersman. "If I have to come back there to steer, I'll feed you to the harpies!

"Do you have the ship in sight?" His bull-throated roar caused the steersman to cringe. "Do you?"

"A quarter league off the starboard bow," the steersman called. "But he still has sail! We'll never catch him!"

"We'll catch him."

Kratos had pursued the merchant ship for days. The other captain was a shrewd and able sailor. He'd tried every trick Kratos knew, and even a few new ones, but with every passing day, Kratos's sleek galley had herded the merchantman ineluctably toward the one hazard no vessel could survive: the Grave of Ships.

Kratos knew his quarry had to come about. To enter that cursed strait was the last mistake any captain would ever make.

Ahead, looming like jagged rocks amid the narrow strait, lay shattered hulks of ships beyond number that had, through misfortune or miscalculation, found their way into the grave. No one knew how many there might be-hundreds, perhaps, or thousands, listing in the tides and the treacherous crosscurrents, grinding their hulls against one another until finally they either broke apart into splintered flotsam or took on enough water to sink. But even that was not the end of their hazard. So many wrecks rested on the seabed below that they had built themselves nearly back up to the Aegean's surface in artificial reefs, waiting to rip out the hull of any unlucky ship above. These reefs could never be mapped, for no ship that entered the grave ever left it. So many sailors had perished here that the sea itself had taken on a foul reek of rotting meat.

Kratos nodded to himself as the merchantman dropped its sails and unshipped its oars for the turn. Escape was close-or would have been, in any other region of the sea. But the ship was too near already to the Grave of Ships. Even as the merchantman began to reverse course, a colossal head rose from the depths and crashed down on the ship's deck; then its sinewy neck curled about and tried to break the mast.

Whenever the wind quieted for a moment, Kratos heard plainly the screams and battle cries of the merchantman's crew as they frantically hacked at the Hydra's neck with short swords and fire axes. More heads curled upward from the depths below. Kratos signaled the steersman to make straight for them. No point in waiting for them to get free; they were too busy fighting the Hydra to notice that they were being pulled into the grave.

All around floated the deserted, destroyed husks of ships either lacking the protection of the gods or bearing the fate of their condemnation. The closest vessel they passed had clearly arrived not long before Kratos and his quarry. A dozen or so sailors were pinned to the mast-impaled by a single immense spear. Harpies had picked at the bodies. Most of the sailors were mere shreds of flesh hanging on bloody skeletons-but the one closest to the mast was still alive. The sailor caught sight of Kratos and began to kick feebly, stretching out his hands in a silent plea for mercy.

Kratos was more interested in that immense spear-its presence hinted that a Cyclops might be nearby. He stepped to block the steersman's view of the death ship. "Pay heed to your course."

"Lord Ares opposes us," the sailor said in a choked voice. "The harpies-the Hydra-these are now his own creatures! All of them. Would you defy the God of War?"

Kratos cuffed the steersman hard enough to knock him to the deck. "That merchantman has fresh water. We have to take her before she sinks, or we'll all die swilling the sea. Forget Ares. Worry about Poseidon." He hauled the man back to his feet and set...

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Verlag
Random House Worlds
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
034550867X
ISBN 13 
9780345508676
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Del Rey
https://www.penguin.co.uk/company/publishers/cornerstone/del-rey-uk

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