by Emil Petaja
"What is it?" Varjo begged.
Wayne moved a hand but his jaw was locked tight. A rush of self-guilt was choking him.
"What did I do?" Varjo turned to Wainomoinen.
Wainomoinen told her, simply and bluntly. Then, when she had sobbed for awhile, he said, "It wasn't your fault, child. It was the Hollow. The residue of Louhi's evil in the Hollow."
"I—I don't understand." Mouse-timid, again.
"After Loviatar died the Hollow seemed to die, too. That was why I didn't do anything about it except to bid our people shun it as they would Hüsi himself. Yet, it wasn't dead. Not quite. It needed strength. It drew this from your soul
—yours and Mummu's. Living in that contagion place, breathing the air of this small under-Pohyola, you fed it and it replaced what it drained out of you with its own contagion."
Varjo's white face twisted. "Then I am of Louhi and Loviatar! I am wicked and lost! Lost, lost, lost!"
Wainomoinen made a sharp invocative sound. "We can't be sure of that, yet. For Mummu it was too late. But, if you are truly one with Louhi after your years in the Hollow, she will call you. She will point you a way to serve her or—"
"Go to her?" Wayne cracked out.
"Nün. We must wait and see. Wait and see."
Wayne stared at him while novas burst in his brain. He had repelled the monstrous, rejected it, but it had spawned in spite of his disbelief, spawned and sprouted and borne evil fruit; now he must accept the incredible, the wondrous, the thunderbolts. His duty was plain. Unwittingly he had brought dead and horror into the village. He must fear with the rest of them. Fear and fight, only he must be more cunning even than Kettu, the fox. More cunning than Louhi herself!
"Will the bonds hold her if the evil takes hold again?" he asked in a dry whisper.
"No."
Already Wainomoinen was pulling on his blue sorcerer's robes and preparing for an ancient ceremony. Wayne stood by while the wizard sang the old songs against elemental evil, conjuring what had hold of this girl to flee back into the black places in the stars. Varjo screamed a panther's scream when Wainomoinen put the Mark on her forehead and her breast. Then she sank back with a mouse-squeak against the pine-needle pallet, spent and weak and death-pale from the spell Wainomoinen cast on her.
Wainomoinen left. Wayne lingered, stared down at the pale fragile dryad with the big gray eyes. The hate in him drained away. Varjo had been so vulnerable to the dark stuff of evil lurking in the Hollow. A tormented waif. How could she know what was happening to her? And if she knew, where else could she go? Nobody wanted her.
Well, he thought, she was safe now. Safe in a web of magic. Safe from Louhi and from herself. Lying there with her eyes closed, her cheeks brushed with color from her unnatural feast, that little pulse leaping in her throat like a captive bird…
When he willed it her eyes fluttered open.
"Varjo," he said gently.
"Jo, rakkas."
"You know that I love you."
"Yes. I would love you, too, if I dared."
Wayne took hold of her bound wrists. "I can't let this happen to you. They'll have to kill you. I can't let that happen. I can't!"
She sighed a tremulous sob. "What can you do? Waino-moinen pretended I might be saved but he doesn't really believe it. You saw that?"
Wayne nodded fiercely. He sank to his knees. His lips brushed her roughly. He let his head fall on her bosom, passionately. He groaned resentment and rebellion, even against the wizard.
"What must I do? What must I do to free you, VarjoF' he begged.
Something stirred deep within her mouse-eyes. "Only the wizard's silver pukko with the rainbow handle can release me from the Power." When he jerked up, blinking, he saw that her eyes were now soft and pure as two forest pools, color-muted by the surrounding verdure. There was no hint of request about her statement, much less demand.
Wayne kissed her and stared, a long time.
VIII
The hollow glowed below them with an unholy effulgence. Varjo moved down toward the hut. Wayne stood immobile for a moment that was like a breathless eternity. He thought how his hands had trembled when he had moved into Wainomoinen's sleep chamber, stealthily, like a burglar, and with a burglar's intent. Seeing the long bearded figure lying there under his blue coverlet, almost he had cried out and ran. He must not do this thing! It was a sacrilege against Ukko himself. And yet…
The trembling stopped, the sweating; his breath stopped, too. Something deep inside his cells pushed him -to the edge of the bed, something forced his hand to grope under the pillows and find the pukko, the silver symbol of Wainomoinen's Power. -…
"Are you sure, rakkas?"
Seeing him hesitate, Varjo had come back up.
Wayne shrugged.
"You are giving up your people, your honor, for me!"
He turned to her roughly. "I give up nothing. The Van-hat are not my people; anyway, they are as good as dead. Why should I stay and die with them? As to honor, I have none. I am a killer by profession. On a scope that would make even Louhi sit up and take notice."
Varjo's eyes were dark pools. They brimmed with curiosity, but there was no sense of shock. She was like a child now, with no trace of equity or inequity, only naive selfness.
"You mean you did bad things?*
"Very bad."
She sighed and moved close. "Tell me about it," she urged.
"Later. Let's go."
Wayne's efforts to light the fire only set him to choking from the smoke billows, but when Varjo took up the chore the flames fairly leaped, right out of her small fingertips. Lifting her up to kiss her red lips, Wayne felt a rush of blood pound through him at a sudden difference in the girl. A passion of fire leaping in her eyes. This was no mouse. Not this warm-lipped clinging creature, alive with breathless passion and physical wants. Maybe it was the blood, maybe the return to her true home. Or maybe it was the blush of first burgeoning passion, and with a kindred spirit of evil yet!
It was there in her eyes, in the curve of her blood-red mouth. Wayne was not of the village. He had defied them, even Wainomoinen—for her.
He kissed her savagely. Her eager mouth. Her eyes. The trapped bird in her throat. Behind them the fire leaped.
"We've got to hurry!"
"Hurry?" She giggled and removed her outer clothes in one deft twisting movement, dropping them to steam vague animal odors on the heartib. She wore only that same simple sack-like dress, or one like it; it served her for a nightgown as well and, clinging thinly to her budding curves, it suited her well. The form was a dryad's but the flashing availableness in her eyes was a trollop's.
When Wayne pulled off his parka, she laughed.
"I'm not sure what you mean." She avoided his grab with a coquettish dance step. "Nobody comes here. Ever."
"They will. Wainomoinen will find his pukko missing and he will come. I can hear him now, swearing a storm and bawling for Elmi to fetch men. Men and torches."
He eyes clouded. "What will-they do?" she pouted. "Bum the hut and raze the ground with salt, silver, and the Power."
Varjo moved into the curve of his arms with a confident shrug. "Wainomoinen can't hurt me. Louhi won't let him!"
"What makes you so sure?"
Her eyes flashed. "I—I'm just sure."
"Don't be. It's true that Wainomoinen can't touch Louhi herself, especially since he can't get to her in Pohyola. But what are you to the Witch? You're only an accident, a happy accident. Why should she bother to protect you?" Wayne pulled her to him with a lustful grin. "Never mind. We'll die together and—happy, eh?" His hands moved to cup her firm young breasts.
She stiffened doubtfully, then gave a panting laugh. Her polymorphic being vacillated between childish shivers of terror of the leaping fire and the abandoned desires of a vixen witch. Years of breathing the invisible taint of Louhi's residual sorcery in this thrice-cursed Hollow had about done its work; the way she had torn open Wayne's arm was the first phase; turnin
g kettu to kill the Karkenen widow and drink her blood was the second. Giving herself to lust would strengthen the evil bonds and would align Wayne deeper on the side of the demonaic…
They made wild passionate love. Wayne's odd prowlings and sniffings of the hut, as if he sought some focal point of evil, found him a vat of berry juice that had fermented. He dippered up a cupful and drank. He whistled and whooped. They were both swilling and embracing again when, suddenly, Wainomoinen's voice rang out in his mind like an admonishing tocsin.
They were here! Wainomoinen and the Imari men were poised with smoking flambeaux at the rim of the Hollow. The wizard's face was uplifted into the dark sky, invoking Ukko. His voice was thunderous with anger and resolution. Wayne's mind looked for a sign of pity for him, of fore-bearance; there was none. The wizard's degree of total exorcism and erasure of the wicked was immutable; it brooked no trace of leniency. Not for any wide-eyed waif. Not for Wayne. Twice before Wainomoinen had been swayed by compassion. No more. Wayne had been told, over and over again. He had chosen Louhi. Well and good. So be it.
Wayne lifted Varjo to her feet. "W-What is itf"
His fingers were tangled in her long hair; it seemed to be on fire already. Her eyes were deep with drowsy content, but the way his muscles went stiff around her suddenly made her pout.
"Can't you hear their boots crunching on the dry sod? Listen! They're on both sides of us!"
Varjo gasped, then held her breath intently. "It's the fire in the hearth," she said.
"No. They're putting the torches to the logs in a dozen places. This hut's dry as tinder. It'll go up in one glorious burst." He made a wry face, then grinned, and curved his arm around her with a resigned shrug. "No matter. We will die together, my little Shadow." Varjo wriggled free.
"I—I don't want to die! I'm young! I've only started to live. You showed me what it is to be happy, to laugh and sing. Now I have to die!" She ended in a desolate wail. Wayne swore a bloody oath, striding the pine floor. Varjo watched him with eyes that beseeched. He was so tall, so strong. He had defended her twice before. He had even stolen Wainomoinen's sacred knife to cut her free from the bonds of Power. He would restrain the villagers from this act. He must!
Her fists pounded his chest. "Call to him!" she cried. "Make him stop!" Wayne shook his head. "No. I know Wainomoinen. If he had any qualms about destroying us he is over them. Once he has made his mind up…" He shrugged.
"Look!" Varjo screamed.
"Hüsi!" He stared at the puffs of smoke that were oozing in where the dried mud between the logs had cracked and dropped clods. From left and right the smoke rolled across the adzed planks. In moments the smoke would become flame.
He watched Varjo's eyes widen in remembered fear, watched her desperation leap into panic.
"No," she moaned. "No."
Wayne went to her and took hold of her arms. He held her at arm's length and shook her until she stopped whimpering and her despairing look became sudden animal anger. Anger at everyone. At Wainomoinen and the Vanhat. At a world that had beaten her and threatened her all of her days. A flaming burst of all-hate that turned her eyes into crimson pits and curved her mouth into a fanged horror.
"Listen, Witch!" Wayne faced her full, with a kind of crafty smile. "There is a way—think!"
"WayF
He shook her again, savagely. His fingers bit her flesh brutally. His trapped wolf's snarl matched her feral rage.
"You know where the Way is I" he rasped. "Think!"
"Think, Witch! Look!" He pointed at the way the lower logs were charring and little tongues of fire spurted to embrace them. The lines of flame widened while they stared.
"I don't know any Way!" Varjo moaned.
"Yes, you do. I have seen it groping across your mind. Louhi has whispered to you in the night, telling you that when you have matured in evil you may come to her. You have grown up, Varjo. You have drunk blood. You have perverted me into a thief of sacred things. Note is the time. Now!"
One whole side of the hut was blazing. The hot breath of hell fanned them in compulsive waves. In a moment, when the flames reached the single window, tunneling-in oxygen would sweep in Wainomoinen's vengeance in one great roar of ravening flame.
"Varjo!" Wayne shouted above the crackling. "Save us!"
The girl gave one last swirling look at the torrent of fire that surrounded them, then fell to her knees. For a chilling second or two Wayne thought her witch-self had reverted and that she was praying. Then he saw that she was scrabbling and clawing at a trapdoor at the room's center.
He bent down to help. Varjo was wailing and mumbling in crazy rocking phrases; every sentence ended in the screamed implore, "Aiti!" Varjo was indeed praying. To her stepmother, Louhi of Pohyola.
When Wayne lifted the trapdoor he disclosed a black gape cut into pure stone, and a dank rotten odor like the released ghosts of a million unspeakable sins. But there was no time to think about it. Varjo was screaming her gibberish and dropping onto a progression of steep steps spiral-ing down, down. Nor was there time to snatch a light from the torment of fire from which they fled.
Wayne thought he heard the roof collapse above diem when the implosion struck.
PART THREE
VIPUNEN THE INFINITE
"Vipunen, in songs most famous, Opened then his mouth yet wider, And his jaws he wide extended, Gulping in the well-loved hero, With a shout the hero swallowed."
Kalevala: Runo XVII
IX
The descent of that stone corkscrew was like a forever thing, but eventually Wayne felt a breath of stirring wind on his face and a kind of lessening of dark. What form the light took, as they groped off the last step that wasn't there and down a half-round of corridor that echoed back their footsteps hollowly, was difficult to determine. Until, as the sulphurous green glow increased and Wayne saw stone, he decided that it came from the wall. The sidewalk and the arch above them were covered with a greenish-white slime, phosphorescent, so that Wayne allied it with the fungus of the Hollow. Over the years the spores had worked their way up, or down, or crabwise across Ilmatar's time-tapestry, to sprout up in the dead black ash.
"Where are we?" Varjo whispered, shuddering close to him and away from the slime.
"Pohyola."
"But-"
"I know. How can we go down and be up? Don't ask me. Louhi is full of time-tricks and space-tricks. You begged her to save us and she graciously permitted us the, Way. What was needed was the catalyst, the tie—you're it."
"Oh."
Varjo was a little girl again, and scared stiff. She clung to him as they moved into a wider hall, now. The wind that soughed and skirled through unseen fissures in the rock carried with it wisps of fog and a rank odor as of an animal cage in an extraterrestrial zoo. Wayne gagged from it and tried to hurry them at a faster pace, toward the foul smell's source; yes, to it and beyond it.
Beyond it was not so easy.
Varjo screamed when she saw the snakes.
Wayne sucked air sharply and pulled up before the high black gate around which the leprous worms were wound. No. It was all one great tangled length of lazily gliding horror that covered the iron barrier, from the crossbars at the base to the needle-sharp points thirty feet over their heads. When the worm detected them, it moved sluggishly. Its flat corpse-gray heads weaved toward them, lethargic still from an infinity of time at its guardian post, in excessive boredom. When the olfactories in the multiple heads were pleasantly surprised by a diversive intrusion after all this time with nothing to do but sleep, the Gate Worm opened all of its eyes. The sudden blaze of topaz light made them jump back.
"W-What is it?" Varjo gasped.
"I seem to remember something Lemminkainen told me. How once, when he was denied entrance to the Witch's Castle for some great feast or other, he sought a way in from below, through the dungeons."
"We're in the dungeons?"
"Yes. The Worm guards the under Way, as the sentinels with the great thunderhorns guard th
e Cliff. The purple fog that never leaves the time-island makes it impossible to land on it by air."
The Worm opened its jaws, hissing and slavering pleasur-ably. When one of the heads struck so close that they felt its warm fetid breath fan their faces, Varjo screamed, "Aiti! Help!"
"Lotto won't help us," Wayne said. "I have a feeling she is taking all this in and enjoying it." He drew Varjo back from the corrosive flecks of spuming ichor when the Worm made hypnotic sinuous movements with three heads, then lashed out again, one after another. **What can we do?" Varjo wailed.
Wayne whipped out Wainomoinen's pukko, thrust the~girl behind him, and lunged at the nearest head. It dipped, but the surprise of an attack after all these centuries, and the magic in the silver blade, caught it unaware. Lopped clean, the head flopped on the black stone, still writhing. But where that head had been a moment before, another grew in its place, thrusting out from the whipping neck' like repulsive lightning.
"You can't!" Varjo moaned. "Not even with Wainomoinen's magic can Louhi be defeated, not on her evil island!"
"Who wants to defeat her?" Wayne shouted. "I came here to join up!"
"To be with me," Varjo said. "Of course. Meanwhile…"
The Worm had not retreated, not by a whit. The bravado of the intruder and his sharp pukko only served to excite its sluggish emotions and its anger. All of the heads were flailing and hissing now, and it seemed to Wayne that its muscular girth swelled and grew. The stench was overpowering.
Wayne sheathed the blade under his wide leather belt. Ignoring the hissing, the burning eyes, and the stink of it, he leaped from their cover behind a curve in the corridor to the middle.