Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 2

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

  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 family, huddled in their little sepulchre deep within the labyrinth.

  At first, Solae's mother had balked at staying in such a place. Clearly the priests who had designed this place had set up many areas for worship. There were long communion tables with all of the Christian symbols carved into the sides. There were quotes carved from the Real One's Holy Book upon the ceiling. There was an altar in the center, and even a baptismal font that collected ceiling rain.

  Solae had to sleep on the communion table one night alone before his mother believed that one of these abandoned churches would be safe for faerie. And even now, she still had her doubts, occasionally waking in the middle of the night screaming that the crossbones on the wall were coming for her, to put her down like the dog the Christians believed she was.

  She was nothing like the woman who bore him, nothing like the glamorous creature who performed every midnight on his father's stage. Then her alto voice had mesmerized the crowd, and her dark eyes had shone with magic unused. She had become the toast of their arrondissement, the center of faerie life in Paris— and beloved among the Real Ones themselves.

  Or so it had seemed.

  When she had gone to the Real Ones after Solae's father's death, they had slammed their doors as if they did not know her. Solae's brother Noene suggested this was because they had not recognized her; to them she was a musical beauty in a smoke-filled room, not a woman with haunted eyes who needed refuge.

  Solae brought the bread, only to find his mother sitting on the priest's chair, carved in marble and pushed against the stone wall— the only wall without bones protruding from it.

  Noene was there with a sausage he had stolen, and together they made a feast. The three of them hadn't eaten that well in days.

  After they finished, his mother looked at Solae. For a moment, he thought she would ask him how he had gotten the bread— how he had survived in the city above.

  But she hadn't ever asked him about that. In fact, she did not speak of the city, as if it had ceased to exist. She hadn't been above ground for four years. It had affected not just her manner, but her sight. Solae had to douse his personal light and find candles for the lamps below. She preferred the gloom, claiming that anything brighter made her eyes hurt.

  "They've returned," his mother said.

  Solae started. The Boche had come into this sanctuary more than once. The last time, Solae had been asleep on the communion table when he heard the clatter of boots against stone. He had doused the candles and climbed into the space between the skulls and the ceiling— a space barely a foot in width.

  He had lain there, his nose pressed against the damp, the bones of the dead digging into his back, as the Boche peered into the chamber.

  "I cannot believe someone would hide here," one of them said in their hideous tongue. "I would die first."

  And then they had moved on, boots clanking with military precision, the click-clicks marking the time it took the Boche to leave Solae behind.

  "Where did you hide?" Solae asked, hoping that his frail mother did not have to lie on bones as he had.

  "Not the Germans," Noene said. "The Communists."

  Solae suppressed his sigh of relief. The Communists were French, and they were not as frightening as his family made them sound. The Communists were part of the Resistance, the French who opposed the collaborationists who had taken the center of French government from Paris and moved it to Vichy to hide the fact that the Germans really controlled all that they did.

  Vichy had become a dirtier word than Communist, and collaborationist the dirtiest word of all.

  "You heard them?" Solae asked, pretending a concern he did not feel.

  "They are plotting violence," his mother said, as if the violence she spoke of was directed at her.

  "They say the Americans have landed in Normandy." Noene could not hide his enthusiasm. "They worry that De Gaulle will come here and destroy them."

  That was not the real worry of the Communists. Solae knew more about them than he told his family. He had found the Communist enclave long ago, and during the dark nights, had snuck through the bones to find the enclave, listening to the speeches and the pep talks and the news.

  It was from them that Solae had picked up the word Boche , which suited the Germans much more than any other word had. He did not want to speak of them with respect. He needed a word that was profane for what they had done to his city, his family, his home.

  The Communists had taken to hiding in the sewers more than the catacombs, and planning small attacks against Germans. They disarmed the Vichy police, they occasionally killed a storm trooper who found himself alone, and they sabotaged shipments of French goods back to Germany.

  The Communists were only a small part of the Resistance, but they were hated by their own people, and feared, for when the Germans were defeated and Vichy gone, the Free French believed the Communists would rise up and take over the government— obligating the French to Stalin and the Soviet Union the way Vichy obligated France to Hitler.

  But Solae did not share that fear. The Communists called themselves freedom fighters, and they were fierce advocates for France.

  He admired all they did. Sometimes he sat in the shadows and listened as they made their plans. He wished he could help them, but he could not. If someone died —even accidentally— because of his involvement, he would lose what little magic he had.

  For that was why faerie were so easily defeated throughout Europe. Their powers were the powers of life, lost when touched with death. Faerie resisted coming into the catacombs for that very reason— even ancient death disturbed them.

  It took a courageous few to live below, test their powers, and report to the others before the entire community found the shelter and safety they needed.

  Solae wished he could help the Communists. He did what he could. He was what some called a passive member of the Resistance— he taunted the Boche, stole from them or their Vichy compatriots, and destroyed their writings wherever he found them. Sometimes he siphoned precious gas from their cars, but carefully, never allowing his powers of light to touch the liquid for fear of a fire.

  He did what he could, but it was very little.

  "Aren't you worried by this?" Noene asked. "They will start a war above us."

  "There is a war above us," Solae said.

&
nbsp; "But not like the countryside," Noene said. "Paris still stands."

  For the moment. But Solae did not say that. Instead, he said, "They say De Gaulle will be here by the first of September, and I believe it. Many of the Germans who are not soldiers have stolen what they can from the city and fled."

  "What will happen to us?" his mother asked. "If Communists find us, they are even more ruthless than the Germans."

  She was thinking of the Russian communists. She had lost family in St. Petersburg, which the communists had then renamed. Sometimes, she said lately, her entire life had been about loss.