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.