Clash of the Titans Read Online Free

the course of injustice.
    "Come back!" shouted the officer Kimosos. "Come back, cowards! The decision was just. The people and the priests approved it, as did you yourselves." He waved his sword warningly at the retreating backs of the king's bodyguards.
    "It's only another storm, you fools! I will see you all set on the rocks with your guts ripped open for the birds to feed upon!" But threats did not slow the pace of those running from their king. They were swallowed up by the bowels of the palace, a refuge whose strength and solidity was suddenly vanishing.
    Kimosos bent to his king. "My lord, I will have them tracked down and properly dealt with. You need stronger men for your personal guard. Men who are fit to match your own . . . your own . . ."
    Kimosos stumbled away, the back of one hand covering his mouth, his shield clattering to the marble floor. He had looked into the king's eyes. In them he had seen madness, and his own incipient destruction.
    Wind roared through the columned buildings, tore potted plants from atop balustrades and porticos, and ripped at the friezes worked by dying slaves to immortalize their uncaring masters. Dust filled the air. Oak and olive trees began to splinter under the force of the gale while smaller bushes were uprooted and thrown through the streets.
    Men and women who had thought themselves the chosen stumbled about in confusion as they sought shelter from the anger of the sudden storm.
    It blew straight in off the Gulf of Argolis and from the Aegean beyond, that wind. It rose from the far stretches of the Mediterranean, nurtured by sources beyond the range of human perception.
    Near the seaward side of the city, terrified soldiers fought to close the great harbor gates against the wind, as though they could shut out the storm like some mortal, but close by the water's edge the gale was too strong. The gates were thrown open, the soldiers sent tumbling like toys in the dirt.
    The seas have their own private places. But man persists in searching them out, probing and peeking with his tiny devices to see what lies beyond the next overhang, beneath the next reef. There are some places never to be discovered and best left forever undisturbed.
    Poseidon glided purposefully toward one such place. Ahead lay a massive underwater seamount fronted with metal worked by Hephaestus himself. Those gates, requiring a thousand mortal years to forge, had to be strong enough to hold something older than a god.
    Bubbles larger than boats occasionally emerged from cracks between mountain and metal. They burst there in the dark depths or worked their buoyant way upward around unhealthy-looking sea growths: distorted corals, bloated anemones, hideous sponge things noisome with coatings of luminescent slime.
    A rush of bubbles erupted from behind the massive doorway. The sea god knew the thing beyond sensed his coming. It hated him, as it hated all the gods who had destroyed its kin and taken mastery over the world. But Zeus had bound it, kept it alive for millennia, and it would do his bidding.
    If it could not kill them, it would settle for killing whatever was offered.
    The great bars on the doors were thick with crustacea and tangled growths, but even these odd life forms moved aside at the sea god's command. Even cleared, it required all Poseidon's inhuman strength to draw those bars aside. Among the gods only he and Zeus could master the creature, but even so, it was prudent not to challenge it unnecessarily.
    It knew already what was expected, and moved impatiently inside its cage, eager to be about its task.
    Poseidon slid the last bar aside, then moved away as he tugged the great doors open.
    A head emerged hesitantly from the opening in the side of the seamount, a head larger than the entire figure of Poseidon. It was followed by an immense, dark body propelled by a huge scaled tail. The Kraken possessed a pair of arms and below them, a pair of cephalopodan tentacles lined with rasp-edged