The Star Mill Page 11

  It wouldn't budge!

  Fashioned for one thing only, it could not help him now. It concealed itself around his belt as if it didn't exist; it fooled Louhi into unawareness of its existence; still, what good was it if he never got the chance to use it?

  "Where is that insect, Koko!" Louhi grumbled, lifting her black walnut face out of her porridge. "Where are my seed cakes?"

  Ilmar's dour smile downtilted his hps, but he was grateful to discover that Louhi had a carnal weakness. Food greed. After all, the sorceress of Pohyola, consort of star demons, had human organs within that shrunken, ancient body. That they were kept functional by her tricks with time was neither here nor there. Her perverse being evolved from the same beginnings as the Vanhat.

  His glance measured the round room; servants tending to the witch's cranky desires in and out of the black doorway told him something surprising. There were no other rooms on this level; things were trooped up for her from somewhere below. Where, then, was the Sam-po?

  The explanation struck Ilmar like a thunderclap. The Star Mill was further up.

  Ilmar idled over to the window. A look down sent his senses to spinning. The courtyard below was a toy-town with linsey-woolsey-clad ants scuttling about. He craned a careful look up. Purple fog shadowed the Tower's summit. As far as he could see there were no ladders, no projecting stones, only a smooth unscalable surface of black stone.

  "Get away from that windowl" Louhi snarled. "I won't have you flinging yourself out, I want you to feel the dogs' fangs gnawing your bones!"

  Ilmar shrugged, moving toward her. "I was just wondering about the Sampo." "Keep wondering, Redbeard."

  He decided to try, anyway. "Rather than stay trapped in the Black Storm any longer, why not destroy it before it reduces the universe to rubble and spoils your fun?"

  "There are other universes." She showed her toothless gums. "Other times."

  "Still-"

  "Still nothing, offspring of Ilmarinenl The Sampo cannot be destroyed. Once the power to convert any molecular matter into any other was started, the chain reaction is forever. Your ancestor and his meddling friends, Vainomoinen and Lemminkainen, found that out. Even I couldn't. The best I could do was to reverse its function. Now it must sit up there on its pedestal, gnawing away at the universe and all matter within it, until there's nothing left to disintegrate."

  Her wild cackling turned his blood to ice.

  The black door-curtain trembled and Koko burst in, out of breath and carrying a covered tray.

  "About time," Louhi grumbled. "Bring me the cakes, bug!"

  When the curtain billowed, Ilmar thought he caught a small glimpse of full blue skirt and white blouse. Lou-hi's sharp eyes were on the cakes and her demand for more of her unholy tea. At least it seemed so until she spit out, "Come in, Karina. I won't bite you. I won't even gum you. Come in and say goodbye to your Van-hat friend."

  The girl stepped through the tremulous curtains, her blue eyes wide and fearful. Ilmar went to her, took her hand. Sight of him put back a hint of color to her cheeks.

  "I thought you were dead!"

  He put an arm around her, to keep her from dropping to the stones out of relief and horror.

  "Soon," cackled the hag. "Soon, you stupid child." She chomped her cakes with noisy relish. "What brought you up here? Do you want to die with your hayloft lover?"

  Karina's cheeks sprouted crimson flowers. "He's not my lover! I—I heard about the dogs and—" She looked at Ilmar passionately. "You were gone! I was afraid, but I had to know what happened. I made Koko bring me back with him." She faced, the Witch with desperate courage. "I don't care what you do to me."

  "Good!" Louhi mocked. "I have amusing plans for you, trull. But first you might enjoy watching Ilmarinen's son play games with my pets. That will be your punishment for not telling me about his arrival at once. For hiding him."

  Koko was feeding the fire and fingering his long ears absently. His appendages began to quiver violently as Louhi vented her anger with Karina in an explosive tongue-lashing.

  "You won't kill her, Mistress?" he begged. " 'Cause if you do we won't get any more of those nice cakes."

  "Silence, bug. I shall simply take a page out of Ilmar's book and erase her memories of him, as he did yours. Come close to me, girl!"

  An invisible demon's wire dragged Karina away from Ilmar toward Louhi's throne. Ilmar was on the point of disturbing the Witch's pattern of concentration, when another idea struck home. He moved across the room to Koko without sound.

  "Koko!" he whispered into one of those more-than-ears, "we're all in peril of death from this Witch!"

  "Not me?" he wailed.

  "You, too! I can't explain it to you. You wouldn't understand. But you've got to help us!" "Help?"

  "You love Karina, don't you?"

  Koko gaped, saucer-eyed, while the wheels in his oversize head meshed cogs and moved with ponderous effort.

  "But-"

  Behind them the Witch was aiming her mind at Karina, pruning away her memory of Ilmar very carefully, so that none of her baking talents would be disturbed. It was what she had done to Ilmar, not simple hypnotics but a straightening out of the convolutions of her brain. It occupied her fully, for a moment or two. He must use those moments well....

  "Koko," he said to the alien. "Assume the positon. Do like you do for your Mistress. Show me a remember!"

  Koko's face screwed up in a painful demur, but II-mar's hands on his long ears folded his mantis-legs to a kneel. Ilmar's eyes blazed his demand. Ukko. Give me of your Power.

  "Now, Koko!"

  The gooseberries blanked out and the powdery ions spurted out of Koko's ears. The balloon pictures were ragged and sketchy but there was one....

  "That's it, Koko! Where does the Witch go secretly when—"

  Louhi's boiling scream shattered the rapport between Ilmar's driving demand and Koko's strange talent. Koko fell back in a moaning heap. Ilmar whirled to see Louhi tottering livid-faced off her carved throne, brushing past an immobilized Karina. Her eyes were wide gulfs of horror as she lifted her writhing snake-stick at Ilmar.

  "Die, scum of Otava! Diel"

  Ilmar snatched the lingering Power Thread Ukko had loaned him before it could vanish; he tore his eyes away from the deathtrap leaping out from those windows to hell; he moved without thought, springing behind the Witch and pinning her meatless bones against him. The odor of her ophidian evil was overpowering but he thrust away his retching, his vertigo. This was the time for full belief in himself, in Ukko, in the cumulative essence that had branded him as born to one all-vital purpose. There was no time for anything else. Not for Koko. Not for Karina. Not for his own imperfect physical being. He must demand the Thread of Power, bind it to himself and to the sky-hag, use it, coalesce his spiritual self as the elder Vanhat had, with all that exists and use all that infinitude of power to keep Louhi at bay.

  It was too much; but what he did manage was enough to propel the hag's grotesque physique to the window. A twist that snapped bone sent the serpent-stick hissing across the chamber.

  Ilmar hoisted her, shrieking, to the stone ledge. A low fog-ridden wind plucked at her scarlet robe. Her shrieks changed to a long compelling wail aimed at her bizarre consorts brooding in the black fathomless reaches of space, but in a leap Ilmar was up on the ledge with her, clapping his hand over her mouth. They teethered there for a tangled moment, on the brink.

  "None of your tricks, madam," Ilmar gritted. "I've got your mind in a net. Now—up the wall, please!"

  Louhi's strangled moan was venom that stung his hand like fire. With one swift move he ripped a long tatter of gag from his torn tunic and rammed it in her mouth. Louhi's voice must be stilled as her mind had been snared, during that tick of time when she was overconfident and cut-powered from snipping off bits of Karina's memory. Ukko's power crackled around them like invisible thunder, to Ilmar's genetic claim on him, but it was up to Ilmar to hold it fast. And that was like holding quicksilver, lik
e milking a goat into a sieve. Louhi, Witch of all Witches, was fighting to free herself, and Ilmar would not be able to hold her for long.

  His left hand held her wrists behind her, while bis right spun her to the sidewall and the brink, if they must fall, it would be them both. He felt her bone-bag of loose skin shudder with the prospect of annihilation; below them the whole of Hiisi's sky-island quaked. Was this the end of such perfection of evil?

  "Up I" Ilmar cried in her ear. "Climb up!"

  She shook her head and hunched her hump to indicate that there was no way to go up.

  "Up, Witchl I saw it in Koko's remember. You ought not to have let him see you scuttle out of this window. Where else would you be going but to gloat over your treasure? You yourself gave the first hint when you said, 'up on its pedestal.'"

  Louhi's moan was a scabrous prayer to unholy things, but when Ilmar teetered her and himself half-off the ledge she lashed loose a claw and grabbed. Where she grabbed, a hairy black hand appeared, to clasp it. Up she scuttled, like a scarlet demon's wing, up the ladder of hairy hands. And Ilmar after, among, and with her.

  It was a frantic pull, up into the purple fogs that forever shroud Pohyola like a hallmark of horror. Louhi moaned and rattled her ossified bones to shrug herself free from him, but Ilmar's grip and his voice whispering in her ear that Ukko was still with him and it would be them both that felL kept her upclawing for the hirsute rungs. Her hate would kill Ilmar but would .kill her, too. It was stalemate.

  At last they were climbing over the serrated ramparts and Ilmar found himself blinking up at the machine of all-power, the rearranger of all matter, which Louhi's meddlesome magic had twisted into a thing that only broke up all matter and fed on what it shattered.

  Staring, Ilmar found it hard to believe. But the great whirling ball of rainbow colors was there, there in the center of the Towers top on its black stone pedestal, hurling up its malignant and implacable power in a soot-black spiral into the void to destroy all that the universe had so painstakingly contrived for untold millenia.

  Unbelief turned to awe.

  "What is this wonderful, terrible thing? This thing that can uncreate and recreate—that can take the smallest particles of existence and change them into whatever its master wishes!"

  Ilmar shivered and almost loosed his mind-clutch on the Witch. Ancestral guilt flogged him. What a fool Ilmarinen had been! What a consummate fool! Even in its original happier state the Sampo was a menace. Food. Clothes. All manner of luxury. What then? No. To possess the Sampo in any form was to become greater than a god....

  He must do it fast. He must not think on it

  NOW!

  The rubied hilt of the Flame Sword leaped to his grasp this time, for within was Ilmarinen's blood and the essence of his time-stopped will to destroy what he had created. The sword flamed out like a glorious threshing whip; it sang across the mordant fog like all-things' ransom personified; it blazed with sunfire as it streaked out to catch the Star Mill in a spinning noose. Seeing the god's thing crumble and vanish shook Ilmar's soul so that his cells forgot to hang on to Louhi, forgot that he was the convergent apex of starpower. He had done what the painful foregathering of ancestral fumbling with genes had designed him for. It was over.

  Overhead, Louhi's cackle mocked him. She had slipped away while he was wonder-dazzled by the destruction of the Sampo. That cackle said: We vow. meet again, puny dog of the Vanhatl

  Walking across the misted meadow, Ilmar holding Karina's hand and Karina holding Koko's, the dwarf observed, "That scar on your face is gone, Cousin Toivo."

  Ilmar laughed down at the little alien with the gooseberry eyes and the remembering ears, wondering what Aino would say to such a foster-child after the wedding-feast was over.

  "Where are we going, Cousin Toivo?" Karina asked.

  "I'm not your—" Ilmar sighed. "Never mind. Ill fill you in after we get there."

  "Where are we going?" Koko chortled.

  "Through that Gate at the edge of the forest," Ilmar told them, thick-throated with joy to see his Valley once again.

  "GoodI" Koko cried. "I like picnics!"

  rME STAE MULL

  The castaway on the interstellar asteroid on the fringes of space's forbidden region proved to be disaster to his res-curers and an enigma to the leaders of Earth. Yet, at whatever cost, he was a puzzle that had to be solved, for he seemed to be the single being that was immune to the growing storm of disintegration emanating from the Ursa Major constellation.

  It would be up to this mind-blocked stranger, Ilmar, to solve his own mystery—but the further he penetrated into his own time-space pattern, the more he realized that he was the living embodiment of an ancient legend pointing to a date with destiny beyond the frontiers of known science.

  Derived from the cosmic suggestions of the ancient Kalevala, this is a truly unusual novel of science, adventure, and fantasy.