Clockwork Chaos Read Online Free Page B

there.”
    “Well that explains something,” Sparrowknife offered. “I know how he convinced the Antelaunders to work for him. Some of them developed a taste for human flesh. Moore must be paying the cannibals that way.”
    “So he’s got a larder full of corpses stored inside a dead leviathan. This just gets better with every passing moment. Who are they, I wonder?” Cobham asked.
    “From the looks of things, I would say anyone who doesn’t agree with that madman,” Kassandra offered. She reached out to Cobham for the finger. He happily surrendered it to her. “Your question constable has another meaning. Who are the people supporting Moore? I think I may have a way to find out.”
    Kassandra pulled back her hood. Shrugging out of her gloves, she reached up to free the long ringlets of her red hair. Her tresses were bound up on her head in a bun transfixed by two amber-colored rods. She pulled the rods out, sparing a moment to twist her hair out of the way. Setting the rods aside near the severed digit, she reached for one of her gloves. Working the liner out, she was able to get at the woolen interior. Regaining the rods, she lay them in the liner. Then she began rub the shafts back and forth. After a few moments, Cobham could see the fibers of the wool starting to stand up as well as the loose hairs on top of Kassandra’s head.
    “Constable, make me some room on the floor please. I’ll need a smooth area in the dirt close enough to the brazier that we’ll be able to see.” Cobham took off his gloves and set about scraping the detritus on the floor away from the desired area. She nodded at him when he was done, then said, “Please place the finger at the bottom closest to me.” As soon as he’d dropped the severed finger on the ground, she leaned forward touching it on either end with one of the rods. A fat blue spark jumped from each rod and the finger shimmered with a slick coating of something that looked like mercury. Cobham had seen Kassandra call spirits before and knew that what he was seeing was ectoplasm, but what she intended next, he had no idea.
    She held out the rods to the two men. “Airman, please write in the dirt on the left here the numbers from one to ten then the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Constable, I need you to write out the letters of the alphabet here on your side.” Then she leaned forward to pick up the finger. Holding it in her hands, she squeezed her eyes closed, took a breath and held it. When she breathed out, silvery ectoplasm coated her lips. It wafted out in gossamer strands in the air as if she were spewing out spider’s silk. Drifting downward, the mercurial matter collected on the finger.
    Both men sat back, having finished writing. Cobham found himself staring as Kassandra lay the silvery digit on the floor. He spared a glance at Sparrowknife. The airman seemed to be taking the oddity of the situation fairly well. Sparrowknife caught the look and commented, “Not to worry, constable, my auntie was well known for making simples and small tellings.”
    “Well, you’re handling it better than I did the first time. Kassandra made everything in the room float including me and brought everything back to earth with a crash,” Cobham said.
    “It was someone else’s equipment with inferior quality at that. As you see, gentlemen, quite a good deal can be accomplished with a small amount. But to business, let us see if we can establish a rapport.”
    The finger slide across the ground as if the surface were ice, coming to rest on Sparrowknife’s scrawl for ‘yes’.
    “Kassandra who are we talking to?” Cobham asked.
    She turned to him for a moment ignoring the finger that was speeding across the floor once again. “Constable this is a ghost. Unlike a spirit whom I would commune with across the divide that separates the living world from those that passed on, ghosts are still anchored here by a need to achieve closure. I would guess that an untimely death at the