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Twenty-Two

High in the rafters of the derelict pier, Inari perched shivering in her ragged silk robe like a seabird blown in from the storm. She found herself constantly fighting the urge to return home, but what if the assassin was waiting for her? She looked down to see cold eyes in the shadows, and a haze of fur.

"You cannot," the badger-teakettle said, in reproof.

"But I don't know what else to do."

"Ask the coins."

"The I Ching? I haven't got any coins—in case you haven't noticed, I'm still in my dressing gown."

"Make them, then," the badger said in its thick, impatient voice. Feeling foolish, Inari touched the tip of a talon to her wrist and drew three drops of blood. As she did so, she muttered a word: change. The red drops hissed as they touched the cold salt metal of the pier, and Inari reached down to snatch up three old worn coins.

"Now throw," the badger said, as though Inari were a child who needed instruction on the simplest thing. She threw the coins carefully into her silken lap, again and again, and studied the configuration that they made. She called the hexagram to mind: Twenty-nine. K'an. The Abyss.

Inari sat back and looked mournfully at the coins in her lap. Abyss upon abyss: grave danger. But no indication of what she should do—go back to the houseboat, or yield to her fears and stay here. It was very difficult. The I Ching was like the polished surface of a bowl, revealing nothing of the contents within the Tao and reflecting only a transformed image. Sighing, Inari gathered up the coins in her lap, but as she did so, her hand closed convulsively over them. There was a soft, stealthy footstep from under the pier, a sucking sound like an eel vanishing beneath the sand. The badger's whiskers bristled. Inari shrank back against the rafters and then, very cautiously, peered over the edge. Twenty feet below she could see something moving in the shadows under the pier. It was hunched as if old, it moved slowly, but thin dark tendrils shot from it in all directions, questing across the sand. The badger pressed against Inari's side and she could feel it quivering. She watched in unwilling fascination as a tendril coiled around one of the struts of the pier and began to climb upwards like the fast-forwarded image of a growing vine. On the sand below, the figure was utterly still.

"What is it?" she murmured to the badger.

"I do not know. We must go, Inari. Now."

"But where?" Inari whispered. The tendril had reached the rafters and was snaking blindly towards her, its tip rising from time to time as though it scented the air. From where they were sitting, her only option would be to leap across to one of the neighboring rafters, then down. She clutched the protesting badger to her breast and stood up. The tendril shot forwards like a whip, but Inari was already in midair. Yet the tendril was quicker still. She heard it crack with released tension as it shot through the air, then something like a burning wire wrapped itself around her ankle. Inari, still clasping the badger, fell some fifteen feet towards the sand, only to be brought up short five feet from the ground. Her hip was jolted painfully as the tendril broke her fall, and she dropped the badger. She saw it bolt in a zigzagging blur over the sand. Spinning dizzily, she could see the tendril stretched taut across the rafter, and her inverted gaze met a pair of black dead eyes, as opaque as oil. The thing's face was partly concealed beneath a hood, but what Inari could see was ominous. She caught a glimpse of pale, pasty flesh, peeling like the cracked glaze on an old jar. It held out a puffy, bluish hand. From above, a single red tear fell like rain, then another, and then another. Inari's oracular coins had turned to blood once more. Raising its hand to its mouth, the being licked its palm with a thick, discolored tongue. A red stain welled out across the wet sand beneath its feet which, Inari noticed through a sudden wave of nausea, were turned back to front upon its ankles. The stain paused briefly as it reached the waves, but then the whole of the twilit sea before her turned red and the sky spun crimson above her. The whip-crack grip on her ankle was abruptly released and then Inari was falling, but much further than the short distance to the incarnadined sand, much further than even the bloody smear of the waning moon above her head, all the way down past the ends of the Earth to Hell.

 

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Framed