Cycle of Nemesis Read Online Free PDF

arm and in turn gripped his am in my fist.

IV
    The man who had introduced himself to us as Hall Brennan banged a fist on the table more in compliance with the idea that this would illustrate to us the importance of what he had to say rather than in any habitual intemperance of expression. George Pomfret raised his eyebrows a fraction, as though to say he hardly expected such behavior in his own house, while the girl, Phoebe Desmond, sat hunched together, the bang of the fist startling her and making her shudder deep within herself.
    The globe which had aroused such deep passions sat smugly on the floor at our side, where I had moved it out of the direct path of the sunbeams falling through Pomfret’s lounge windows. Pomfret, not at all loathe to leave the odious Benenson to await the Bernini Aphrodite, had agreed with alacrity to my request to use his house for the interview, while Phoebe, clinging to my arm, had refused to stay off. Gannets another minute without a friend at her side.
    “For you are my friend, now, Bert. I feel it to be so. We both went through that ghastly experience together and that bonds us—”
    “Like the brotherhood of the trenches?”
    "You can joke all you like,” she had spat back fiercely. “But you damn well know what I’m talking about and you damn well know it’s true. So there.”
    So there we were, gathered around Pomfret’s lounge table and listening to the fairy story being spun by Hall Brennan.
    “I’ve been following up clue after clue for twenty years now. Ever since that first time when I saw myself I determined to get to the bottom of it.”
    That remark, alone, had hooked me.
    “But what brought you to Gannets, just like that?” demanded Pomfret. "I mean—the sale of these wonderful effects has been widely enough advertised.”
    Brennan passed a hand across his clipped moustache. He smiled with the rueful air of a man acknowledging that fate is not with him. “The final clue led me to the globe. One globe out of countless thousands—I thought my search had come to an end, and then, like a lucky win on the rocket races for a wetneck, I saw an account of Gannets and the discovery of all those incredible treasures. I came here as fast as I could. My heli—my heli was attacked on the way.”
    “Attacked?”
    “I’D tell you later.” He produced a pocketknife. “Right now I want to open up that globe.”
    “Just a moment, Mr. Brennan.” I felt absolute confidence that I could protect my property in any physical scuffle that might develop, but I harbored the unpleasant conviction that he would prevail upon me to deface the globe merely through power of will. “Just a moment. That globe is mine. I didn’t buy it to be cut open—”
    “I know, and I will pay you twice—”
    “That’s not the point. I’ll agree to this operation only on condition that you fully satisfy me. In other words, I want to know what’s going on.”
    The butter rich slabs of sunshine that lay across the carpet in Pomfret’s lounge and dazzled from his windows, the fresh air, the sound of birds, the scents of
    early flowers drifting in across those sunbeams, all these homely natural comforting things chilled as Brennan began to speak,
    I felt a tickling pressure on my hand and, opening the fingers, felt Phoebe’s hand snuggled within mine, my fingers grasping and closing over hers.
    “The story is very simple,” Brennan said in a dull voice that rang with the echo of lead. "Simple but lethally so. I suppose none of you has heard of the Time Beast? The Time Beast lying for all eternity in his Time Vault? No? Well, I thought not, and it is natural enough, God knows. I sometimes wonder if I am the only one unnatural, accursed, forsaken upon the face of the Earth.
    “I speak of Khamushkei the Undying.”
    The name splintered deafeningly against my consciousness. I stared around at my companion, and for a moment I thought the ormolu clock on the mantleshelf had stopped ticking, that the