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Forty-Nine

After a while, Pin grew less frightened than bored. He had a nasty moment when one of the kuei's severed legs shot down into the nuclear plant, but it fell short of the reactor and speared a small hut instead. The bulk of the tanks were keeping Heaven's forces well away from the plant itself, although from his vantage point on the observation tower he had an excellent view of lion-dogs and unicorns and various other beasts in Celestial zoology. It still reminded him of various performances and if he ever got back to Earth, what an opera he would be able to write!

Above, with dragons and kuei fighting, the air forces were in a quandary: no additional aircraft could take-off from the ground, and those in flight couldn't get through to the lowest level. So, for the time being, Pin felt reasonably safe, even in such a precarious position. Some of the demons still clung nervously to stanchions, peering out across the desert, but a number of them were crouching in the shade. A card game was in progress.

Then, Pin noticed that dragons and kuei were drawing back. He did not know why this should be. The observation tower shook a little. One of the demons engrossed in the card game looked uneasily up.

"What was that? Earthquake?"

"We don't get earthquakes here," somebody else replied. "There's nothing underneath us."

Pin was thinking that this was surely likely to produce more quakes, not less, when one of the other demons shouted and pointed toward the rocks. "Look!"

At the summit of a band of rocks, a ridge was appearing under the soil. That they could see it from this not-inconsiderable distance suggested that something huge was breaking through, like some enormous worm. Then a black many-pincered head broke the surface, scattering a burst of yellow soil in all directions, and a segmented body shot up after it, towering some thirty feet or so above the rocks.

"It's a kuei!" a demon said. "Where did that come from?"

Four little figures—presumably demons—had broken cover from the rocks and were now racing across the desert toward the nuclear plant.

"Maybe it's one of the ones that fell from the sky," a demon replied.

Pin said nothing. He knew where the kuei, now rearing in a column of waving legs high above the desert, several times the height of the observation tower, had come from. It was the kuei that had pursued him and Mai down through Hell and had, so it now seemed, buried itself in the sands of the desert. And now it was back.

 

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Framed