Jim Baen's Universe

Fantasy Stories

Dark Corners

Written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Illustrated by Ural Akyuz

The fighting had been going on for days. Outbursts of gunfire—six German soldiers dead in front of the Gare d'Orsay—a full-scale battle, complete with barricades that the French love so much, near the Eiffel Tower.

Solae had come to the surface because he heard the Resistance and the Germans had brokered a truce. The Resistance needed the time to organize, to wait for the Allies to arrive. The Germans, who were beginning to understand that they could not hold Paris, needed time to make a plan.

Solae needed food, so he had come to the only safe place he knew—a boulangerie on the Boulevard St. Germain. Most of the French were in hiding, not waiting in bread lines, and the Germans were at their posts.

He'd thought he would be able to slip in and out, unnoticed.

He had been wrong.

Solae ran across the boulevard, a loaf of bread beneath his arm, panic in his throat. He was thinner than most, so thin that if he turned sideways, the less observant could not see him. But he could not turn now.

The baker—a burly man who baked every morning for the Boche as if they were no different from the French he once served—was chasing Solae, shouting at the top of his lungs:

"Foul boy! Thief!"

Two storm troopers appeared from a kiosk, holding ripped posters telling Parisians to rise up against the Boche. The troopers looked ready for battle. They had shiny boots and shinier guns—and their eyes, that pale blue that the Boche seemed to worship—seemed even paler in the August sunlight.

Solae grabbed his bicycle, also stolen, and pedaled as fast as he could, praying that the troopers would not follow in a car. Was a bread thief worth the gas? Surely there were other battles to fight, other people to attack.

But he knew that the Germans—the filthy Boche—were like rabid dogs, unable to let go of anything once they sank their teeth into it.

He pedaled hard, weaving in and out of the bicycle traffic. Despite the fighting, Parisians were still on the streets, going about their business, ignoring the war as best they could, just like they had these last four years.

Behind him, he heard the roar of an engine. He glanced over his shoulder.

The troopers had followed him. Theirs was the only car on the boulevard. Their helmets made their heads look round and comical, but Solae did not laugh at them.

He had not laughed at the Boche for a long time, not since they put out the lights in his fair city. Not since his father's death.

Solae pedaled faster, but he could not stay ahead of the car. It roared behind him, and it would only be a moment before it caught him.

The bread was warm beneath his arm. Sweat ran down his face, and he wished, not for the first time, that he had the magic of his ancestors.

He would make the Boche vanish. He would explode them, destroy their vehicle, wipe their race from the earth.

But he could do none of these things. His people could do none of these things. The powers that had once belonged to faerie had faded centuries ago. When he was his most cynical, he believed that his people had had no great powers at all—that Faeryland and the magic that went with it were the myths the Real Ones believed them to be.

The Boche sitting on the right aimed his rifle at Solae, and Solae's breath caught. He imagined light streaming from his fingers, destroying the rifle, destroying the Boche.

But imagination did not make it so.

Instead, Solae veered onto a side street, then another, his bike bouncing on the cobblestones. He was near the entrance his people kept hidden with their tiny powers.

In one movement, he slipped off the bike and laid it against the closed and locked door of an empty shop. He gave the bike a longing glance—it had been by far the best bicycle he had stolen—then he slipped sideways.

The Boche squeezed their vehicle onto the tiny street, the tires on the left side of the car riding on the curb. The Boche were laughing, calling out in German and bad French, promising le jeune a present if he but stopped for them.

Solae knew what kind of present they would give him: a bullet in the heart. And no amount of magic could undo that kind of damage.

The Boche did not seem to see him, even though one looked directly at him. Solae slipped around the corner and hid against a white wall covered with dead bougainvillea, until the Boche, their merriment gone, backed out of the street and left him alone.

****

Solae had not always stolen bread.

Once the Real Ones of Paris thought him the favored son of a nightclub owner, a man who specialized in acts that had a touch of glamour to them—be it the way a chanteuse's songs seemed to come alive onstage or the way that a young dancer almost seemed to fly as she leapt into the arms of her partner.

There had been magic during those nights. Not the magic of Solae's ancestors, but slighter magic, a bit of beauty that seemed to brighten the darkness.

Not that there had been much darkness then.

Less than a decade ago, when Solae was a little boy, he used to escape the smoke of his father's nightclub and climb onto the roof. There he looked at the lights of Paris—the arc lights illuminating the Eiffel Tower, the gargoyles of Notre Dame grinning in the lights on the dome, the lights of Sacré-Coeur on top of Montmartre, glowing like candles in the distance.

The Real Ones called Paris La Ville Lumière, the City of Light. Perhaps they thought of the clear, crisp sunlight which, they said, they could not find anywhere else; but Solae always thought of the nighttime when the lights of the city made Paris as bright as day.

But when the bombings started, five years before—he had still been a boy then—the lights went out. Paris had not been La Ville Lumière for one-third of his life. It had become a place where darkness grew, like a hole in his soul.

For Solae, the absence of light was like the absence of air. His magic was not like his father's. The family already knew that Solae would not run the nightclub. Solae couldn't enhance acts, nor could he make a plain woman beautiful.

For a long time, his family thought he had no gifts at all.

And then they realized that his gifts were even subtler than usual—the ability to fade away in a crowd, or to brighten a room when he entered it.

Solae was not a creature of the night as so many of his kind were. He preferred the day, and if he had to choose a type of day, he preferred the bright sunlight of a Paris afternoon, the way the light fell upon the Seine, illuminating the classic lines of the Palace du Louvre and the magnificent windows of the Gare d'Orsay.

Sometimes Solae sat on the stone edge of the Pont Saint-Michel and watched the city pass him by, enjoying the light, the warmth, the way Parisians seemed to enjoy each moment.

He had not sat on the Pont Saint-Michel in four years, not since the Boche came in tanks, hanging their filthy flag with its ancient symbol, the swastika, across the Arc de Triomphe.

Usually, his people did not become involved in the ways of the Real Ones, except as his father did, to make money to survive. So many of faerie had moved to the city decades before. No one questioned strangeness in Paris. Even though it was a Catholic city in a Catholic country, certain behaviors were ignored.

Faerie who would have been hanged or shot or burned in the countryside were tolerated here. Many, like Solae's father, were more than tolerated.

They were loved.

And now they were gone. His father to a bullet in the middle of a piano medley. Storm troopers, drunk with power, insisted on hearing "Ein Prosit" and Solae's father, who hated the Boche with a passion that made Solae's seem tepid, refused.

His father had railed against the Boche from the moment they began their campaigns in the Real Years of the 1930s. Remember, he said to his wife and sons, the Germans are the ones who exposed us, told our histories as if they were fables for children, made us less than we are.

And that night, the night the Germans wanted to hear" Ein Prosit," his father spoke of his hatred. The Boche reminded Solae's father that France was theirs now.

France belongs to no man, Solae's father said, his meaning clearer to faerie than it was to the Real Ones in the room. On some level, France had magic in her soul, magic that had been purged from so many European countries long ago.

Soon, the Boche told him, we shall remake France in our own image.

"And you shall fail," Solae's father said, "just as you failed to hear ' Ein Prosit.'"

The words grew heated, and even Solae, who had been near the door, watching the lights of the city with a craving he still did not understand, turned toward the smoky interior of his father's club. Voices rose, shouting in German and French, about country, patriotism, and the emptiness of the German soul.

Then finally the shot, silencing everyone, including the piano player, who had been playing American boogie-woogie as if it could cover the ugliness in the room.

The smoke seemed to clear. Solae's father stood for the longest time, before collapsing in on himself. The Germans kicked him to see if he was still alive, and, when he did not move, they stood. In a loud voice, the German who shot Solae's father ordered the piano player to play " Ein Prosit ," and this time, the piano player did.

Solae had hurried through the crowd to retrieve his father's body. His mother did the same, running from her position behind the wings.

But they both arrived too late. His father vanished into the floorboards, his soul stolen by the stone he landed on, his essence gone as if it had never been

Solae's mother had not been the same since. Solae had taken her and his brother away from that place, which the piano player took over and allowed to become a Vichy stronghold. Solae only hoped that the French who collaborated with the Boche were being haunted by the vengeful ghost of his father and were suffering hideous torment because of it.

That was early in the Occupation, before the Germans began to understand Paris. The so-called decadence of Paris—the homosexuals, the mixed-race couples, the transvestites who performed at the very best clubs, not to mention the Jews, who corrupted (in the opinion of the Boche) every city they touched—disgusted and fascinated the German soldiers and bureaucrats who had invaded the city.

When the Boche discovered that Paris was a haven for yet another group—a group the Germans had slaughtered centuries ago—they were merciless. Faerie were murdered on the street, and no one came to their defense. For faerie were not French; nor were they even human. They were something Other, and as food became scarce, they became little more than mongrel dogs to those who competed with them for every scrap.

Still, faerie were reluctant to leave Paris. They could not go to England, where they had been slaughtered centuries before the Germans came after them, and they could not afford the long trips to America—back in the days before the Americans became part of the war.

The countryside held the same dangers as the city, more so because there were fewer faerie and more Boche, and parts of France had become more German than others.

Faerie finally found themselves relegated to the land no one else wanted, the place no one else would think of as a refuge: the vast tombs beneath the city—the catacombs.

****

That was where Solae slipped now. He went onto the side street through a small, private doorway that faerie kept locked. The Boche thought the doorway led to the courtyard for the apartments above and never investigated.

Although the doorway did lead to a courtyard, beyond the courtyard was a street, a tiny street that the Boche car would never fit on. Part of the ancient city, the street meandered for less than a mile before reaching another boulevard through another doorway.

But underneath the street ran a main section of the catacombs. Solae had discovered the entrance one afternoon when he had explored. Then he had shown it to the elders, and they had used their combined powers to mask the entrance as a whitewashed wall.

Solae touched that wall now. His fingers found the latch that released the stone door, and it swung open, echoing in the emptiness.

He hated the catacombs. They were dark and dank, and they reeked of death. The Real Ones could not smell it, although they did not care for the catacombs either. But the Real Ones had lost their sense of the Beyond, and they did not realize that when their ancestors emptied Paris's graveyards and stacked the bones in the sewers beneath the city, they had stacked the power of death there as well.

Each time Solae descended into the darkness, he felt like he lost a part of himself. He had become convinced that his thinness was not due to his lack of meals but to the pieces of himself taken by the darkness that lived below.

Still, he disappeared behind the stone door. As it closed behind him, he raised his right hand, pressed his thumb and forefinger together, and created a light.

The ability to create light was his only awe-inspiring power. A worthless power, his father used to say. But Solae did not think it worthless any longer, and he often wished that his father still lived so that Solae could prove how valuable the light had become.

Solae held his hand out before him. The light he formed was small—he didn't want to burn himself out this early in the day—and shaped like a flame. Only it did not flicker. The light burned steadily like an electric current, providing constant illumination for his journey ahead.

That was the only way he could tolerate heading into the catacombs. Flickering light would have terrified him, caused him to see ghosts in the shadows where there were none.

The Boche had come below many times, but had found no one. Only rats. For the Boche, for all of their posturing, were the most superstitious race in Europe—and the most terrified of death. They avoided the catacombs as much as possible.

The steps leading down had been carved centuries before by unknown hands, and hollowed by thousands of feet. In the time that Solae had spent below, he wondered at who had moved the bones of the ancient dead. What kind of man would carry skeletons from their natural resting places to the depths below?

The bones were not just placed in a pile. They were stacked neatly in patterns, and the patterns varied. In some places, the skulls formed a congregation of a thousand empty eyes, staring into the passageway. In others, the skulls were the center of a skull-and-crossbones motif.

Solae had found other places where the long bones of the legs and arms formed crosses or stars or other patterns that had existed since the beginning of time. In the middle of one particularly dark night, he had even found a group of bones that formed swastikas—and he had to remind himself that the symbol had been around long before the Boche took it for their own.

The catacombs were deep underground, and he always knew he drew close when water from the ceiling began to fall like rain. He worried that one day, the roof would collapse under the weight of the water above, but others, older and wiser than he, swore that would not happen.

Still, in many places below, the stone floor was wet, and the ceiling even wetter. He had to go through such a place to find his