"Tramontane" is a science-fiction novel by Emil Petaja, the fourth and final novel in a cycle based on the Kalevala. It was published as half of an Ace Double, with the other half being The Wrecks of Time by Michael Moorcock.
In the same far-future setting as we saw in The Stolen Sun, a young but decrepit and misshapen man is picked out of his dystopian future where he is a menial laborer to serve as a consort and spy for the evil witch queen Louhi. This man is Kullervo, the ancestor of the Kullervo of the Kalevala. He is described as ugly and evil, although as the story proceeds he does discover some redeeming qualities in himself.
His mission, to enact the vengeance of Louhi on a remnant of an ancient Finnish tribe still living on earth, takes him to a post-post apocalyptic earth where the crumbling remains of gigantic cities cover an earth that has been almost totally abandoned for at least thousands of years. Kullervo then travels across this world, from a group of worm-symbiotic troglodytes to floating islands full of cannibalistic pirates to the remnants of the ancient tribes, living in a Nordic environment that, after the fall of its great cities, resembles its ancient history. And in the final chapter, Kullervo must decide on his loyalties, and the future of the galaxy.
All of this takes place in less than 120 pages. There is a lot of story compression here, something that I thought took away from Doom of the Green Planet and The Stolen Sun. But here it works: rather than seeming incomplete, the lack of detail of earth's far future made the atmosphere deeper and more involving. I was curious when I reread my reviews of his other two books that I've read and found that I thought they were lacking. Because in this book, things that I thought were flaws become strengths, this book's roughness and weird happenings worked together for me in a way that the others had not. I don't know if I would quite call this a masterwork, but it is definitely a well-written book that manages to convey a certain atmosphere of fear and tension in a unique way.