Mauno sat on horseback, in armor for the first time. A battalion of warriors rode or stood beside him.
“Where is the bishop?” he called.
“Slain, your majesty!”
“By what?”
“By Lalli. On the ice. I saw it from afar. I could not tell you why.”
“I believe I can,” said Mauno. “No matter. We shall not have reinforcement from his God. Muster your forces. Let Ukko fill our swords with thunder. Blast! How can men battle such a thing as this?”
It lumbered onward, now cracking the ice where Henrik’s body lay in a pool of frozen red. As the surface crumbled, his body fell into the water, bobbed, then sank out of sight as the lowest reaches of the Great Thing descended deeper toward the lake bottom.
“Now!” cried Mauno. “While its blades are below the waters! Archers! Send this thing back to the north and over the edge from whence it came!”
Arrows flew, for all the good they did. The archers may well have fired at the sun or the moon. And still they fired more, wasting shaft after feathered shaft.
Then, before it had reached the near side of the lake bank, the mountain stopped still before a tiny figure. There stood Lalli with a small bundle of furs in his hands, raised high above his head.
“This evil from another land I give to thee, vile thing!” bellowed Lalli. He set his parcel in a small skiff and pushed it into a channel of water between broken sheets of ice. He pressed until the water was chest high and gave the skiff a final shove, then turned to race back toward his farmland and his people. He hoped to rid the land of two evils that day.
By the time he reached Mauno, screams and moans were erupting from the villagers. For the mountain had resumed its dread crawl. Heedless of warning, it roamed onward. More and more ice broke until the causeway that reached the nearby fjord was breached. Bits of ice bobbed and flowed toward the only route of escape; as did the skiff, which cut a sharp path straight to the lake’s outlet, as though guided by invisible oars. Dark clouds bunched causing the afternoon sunlight to fail. Snow began to fall.
It took hours for the village to fall silent. Tähti and Aili surveyed the wreckage from the far side of the lake, watching the Old Thing’s peak disappear into the eastern horizon. The setting sun bathed the ground in magic hour glory beneath dark grey skies. Every crushed home and smeared body was vivid for that moment, soon fading into dusk. The sun crept further behind earthly mountains that had never thought to sever roots and hunt madly after human flesh. Aili’s herder whimpered.
“It sees all save us.” The Princess wept hot tears into her cold palms. “Why do we yet live?”
“For years I’ve dreamed and seen beyond, Aili. Our old ways were stories for children. And the new myths woven at the world’s belt are no better. There is but one truth. We are all doomed if such things as we have seen awaken from endless slumber and march upon us.”
“The snow shall bury this land,” said Aili. “We must go south toward hope.”
“Yes. But first, into the fjord and after that book,” said Tähti.
Aili, wracked with grief, could only nod as she unwrapped the coil of rope that moored their boat to a post on shore. She was a woman of Kvenland and knew well how to row. Her oar strokes cut the blackening water and sent them toward the outlet. The dog turned circles in the boat, not knowing where to look or cower.
Tähti scanned both banks in case the skiff with the book had been snared before it could escape. Then the current caught them and there was no more need to row. Aili settled next to Tähti with the herder huddled at their feet. They shared a fur cloak once more, hands wandering in search of comfort. The princess reached down and gave Tähti’s member a squeeze.
“I feared our trysts would have to end when it came time for me to continue our bloodline,” said Aili. “But now I’ve seen that the Queendom can live on. And with a wizard at my side.”
Their boat entered the chasm of the fjord, destruction in its wake. A quest for knowledge unknown lay ahead. And warm love spread fire within.
By night, the fjord was moonlight silent and bitter cold. They would never have survived the chill if not for the dog, Tähti’s flame, and their frantic coupling. The waters slowed; even time seemed frozen. As the moon drifted to its apex, illumination flooded down the great chasm, a pupil-less white eye trained on its unseeing self, mirrored in the black water.
Up the great rock walls on each side were clustered formations of glowing globes. At first they looked like honeycomb refractions of lunar beaming. But with each league they drifted by, the reliefs in the stone seemed more purposely, madly carven. Finally, the frieze was complete, telling a story of time and space beyond measure. Tähti reeled, knew too much. Aili closed her eyes. Then the boat stopped.
Icewhite craquelure faded into pure ivory ribbon that paved the fjordbottom-rivertop as it snaked around the next curve of crevasse. Fifty yards farther down the ice sat the skiff, the stone bundle within.
Tähti stood and began to climb out of the boat. Aili grabbed a sleeve and pulled Tähti forcefully back inside. “What is it?” she asked. “Why have we risked all for this one thing? I would like to live and love and build anew. With you.”
Tähti struggled to put into words how the hideous scrawl of ink had curled like wriggling black maggots into deepest brain recesses. “It is the Kuolledien Kirja, the Book of the Dead. You understand?”
She nodded. And shuddered. “But what should the dead want with us?”
“These things were not dead, but forever sleeping. For aeons. With this book, I… my dreams. I didn’t, couldn’t have known… But there is more knowledge still. I will close the gate!” Tähti leapt onto the ice. The dog followed, slipped, found its footing, and padded forward.
Distraught as she was, Aili was still a queen’s daughter. Her intuition screamed danger of magnitudes unimagined in her scant privileged years in Kvenland. There was only one choice, since she held no fascination for death. She picked up the oars and began to row upstream, away from her love and her horror. The muscles in her arms rippled like rope. She wondered why this course was more difficult than losing her entire village scant weeks after mother’s final crusade. Her tears froze to her face before she was half out of sight.
Across the ice Tähti moved carefully from floe to floe, eventually choosing the same path the dog had taken. A step away from the skiff, the ice began to crack. Tähti froze in place, barely breathing. The dog gave a garbled bark. Its echo throughout the fjord seemed to chip away at what semblance of reality remained. The bubble surrounding this cosmic evening burst at once, and two things happened:
Aili saw a smoldering pyre float toward her, remnants of father Mauno’s funeral skiff, which must have been following just out of sight the entire night.
And far above at chasm mouth slopped the Great Thing. Its immeasurable flank collapsed over the fjord wall, crashing down through the ice to the bottom. Yet still flesh and stone and grass and gross yawning eyes kept coming.
The resulting wave flipped Aili’s craft, and she dived bodily toward Mauno’s buoyant resting place. As she soared through the air, she saw Bishop Henrik’s corpse floating by just under the surface, a rosary in its frozen grip. Finally, Aili landed hard on her father’s pyre, gasping for the wind knocked from her, culling life-giving warmth from the dying embers.