Bailey Baz's Arc

Chapter 12 of 44

The morning after the trade, Bailey woke to a smell like burnt copper. He walked out of his hut and found the swamp changed. Now that he knew the debt was his uncle's, the poison had a source, and the source had begun to leak. Black fluid seeped from the vines and ran into the reeds. The green stalks curled and turned gray. Somewhere past them, a child cried. Bailey's stomach dropped. Children still wandered those reeds, and the water was turning to poison around their feet. Cora ran up behind him, her stained robe flapping. She clutched her cracked wand and the black totem at her throat. "The wards are gone," she said. "I can't hold the den anymore. The poison ate through them last night." She pointed at the reeds. "Two little ones are out there. I saw their tracks." Bailey knelt at the water's edge and pressed his hand to a dying reed. He felt the debt inside it, the same century of poison that had lived in his own chest. He needed something to draw it out. He remembered the tangled dark vine deep in the swamp, the twisted black-root the old book had named as a drinker of poison. It pulled foulness from water the way a wick pulls oil. "I need Colt," Bailey said. "He knows the deep paths." Colt Brennan came within the hour, an old man with a wild white beard and one clouded eye behind a cracked lens. Bailey had guided him out of this swamp fifty-seven years ago, when Colt was still a hunter. Colt had sworn to repay it ever since. He looked at the gray reeds and spat. "You saved my life for this?" he said. "Tell me where to dig, boy." They found the twisted black-root vine coiled in dark water. Colt hauled it free with both hands while Bailey read the old words that woke it. The vine drank. Bailey laid its ends among the poisoned reeds. Black fluid rose up the roots and vanished inside them. The gray stalks slowly greened again. The burnt smell thinned. Bailey followed the clearing water and found the two children shaking in the mud. He carried them out, one on each hip, the way he always had. Cora met him on dry ground and took the smaller one. The reeds behind them stood clean. "It worked," Cora said. But her voice shook. She held up the black totem on her chain. The stone had cracked down the middle, and thin black smoke leaked from the split. "It pulled the poison from the reeds," she said. "But it pulled it into this." Bailey stared at the smoking totem. He knew that smoke. It was his uncle's, drawn out of the swamp and gathered now in the one stone that had always answered to Malachar. The reeds were safe. But the debt had a new home, and it hung around his sister's neck. A voice resonated from the totem, “The dead don’t get to live!” Bailey and Cora knew that voice. It was the voice of Malachar, their uncle.