Free Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk by James Lovegrove

Rinzen and Robin simply professed themselves glad to be alive.
    All three, it goes without saying, were out of the contest.
     
     
    T HAT SAME DAY , more fell by the wayside.
    Mullah Nasruddin, the Islamic scholar cleric renowned for his pithy aphorisms, was tripped up by his own vanity when he responded to an invitation to give a lecture in one of the conference rooms, only to find there was no audience when he arrived.
    Bulgaria’s Hitar Petar, who arranged this prank at the expense of his eternal foe Nasruddin, was literally tripped up – by Kaggen of the Kalahari bushmen – and broke his nose on a chair back.
    Kaggen in turn suffered a broken nose, and worse, when he was sent over to deliver a message and a beer to a biker in one of Sweetwater’s rougher drinking establishments and, owing to his poor command of English, failed to realise that he had been set up so that it looked like he was making a sexual proposition.
    By day’s end our complement of avatars had been whittled down to twenty-six. All anyone could talk about, though, was my three-in-one coup. It was as brassy and audacious a move as anyone could recall.
    “I was right about you,” Bill Gad said to me in the bar that evening. “You really are my main competition this time around. And I know what I’m talking about, being as I’ve won this contest a fair few times.”
    “So have I.”
    “But not lately. Past century or so, you’ve been off your game, spider. I’ve not been getting the contender vibe off of you that I’d come to expect. Not ’til now. What it is, is it’s a good match of rider and horse. You’re in synch, the two of you. Simpatico. When that happens, that’s when things start to cook.”
     
     
    O N MY WAY to my room, I had an encounter with Solveig. She appeared to be having trouble with the ice dispensing machine in the corridor, although I quickly realised she’d been lying in wait for me.
    “Can you help?” she pleaded, holding up one of the small tin buckets that could be found in every room. “I’ve put a quarter in, but this push chute thing doesn’t seem to be working.”
    “Help yourself,” I told her, swanning past.
    “It probably needs a man’s touch.”
    “You’ve got that already, haven’t you?”
    “Anansi...”
    Something about the way she said the name – the sudden croaky tenderness in her voice – halted me in my tracks.
    I turned. “Yes?”
    Her head was bent to one side. She was toying with a lock of her silver-blonde hair. A small smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Aren’t we too old to be like this with each other?”
    “What do you mean?”
    Anansi knew full well what she meant. Ignore her, Dion. Move on .
    “To pretend there’s no connection between us,” Solveig said. “To be aloof. That’s how children behave in the playground. The boy loves the girl but cannot show it, so he punches her and runs away.”
    “I haven’t punched anyone.”
    “We’ve been close before. So close.” She moved towards me, as if to illustrate her point. “You’ve not resisted me in the past.”
    I knew a little of Anansi’s history with Loki and the run-ins they’d had at previous contests. “The past is past,” I said. “Mistakes were made.”
    Too right they were , said Anansi.
    “Was it a mistake? That night in San Francisco? 1962, I believe it was. We were drawn to each other. You were so passionate, so intense.”
    You didn’t have a dick then , Anansi said, and I relayed the remark to her.
    “Details, details,” she replied airily.
    “And he was a married man,” I said. “Anansi’s avatar, I mean. That’s how you caught him out. His wife phoned the hotel room in the morning, you picked up, and all you did was say, ‘Hello,’ and it was game over. This time I don’t have a wife, so you’re not going to get me that way, and thanks to Reynard your little surprise package isn’t a surprise any more. That particular cat is out of the bag.”
    Solveig was