Bailey Baz's Arc

Chapter 33 of 44

The last page named a thing, but not the thing itself. Bailey had read what his mother left him. He was marked before birth to hold something the swamp feared. The rest lay in the deep water, guarded by the one man he had sworn never to beg. Malachar. His bound uncle knew. And Malachar traded nothing for free. Cora found him packing at his desk. She wore the same stained robe she had worn in the swamp, wand cracked in her fist. "You're going to him," she said. It was not a question. "He wants you whole so he can wear you. You told me that yourself." "I'm not going whole," Bailey said. "I'm going with a gift he can't refuse." Rufus filled the doorway behind her, red beard damp, hands cradling something wrapped in cloth. Bailey's cousin set it on the desk and pulled the cloth back. An old lantern sat there, its iron frame cracked, a pale glow curling inside the glass like smoke. "Found it in your mother's things," Rufus said quietly. "Souls she couldn't guide out. She kept them. The swamp can't reach what's already lost." He looked at Bailey with his mother's eyes. "Malachar spent two thousand years alone. Offer him company he can't twist. He'll talk." Crane objected at the door, hand on his sword. "Or you hand the emperor a weapon." But Bailey had already lifted the lantern. Tyrek rowed him out at dusk. The vines parted for the totem half in Bailey's pocket. At the deep water Bailey knelt on the black surface and held the lantern over it. The glow inside the glass shivered. Malachar's voice rose from the water, thin and old. "You came. And you brought me something." "Lost souls," Bailey said. "Yours to keep, if you tell me what I hold. The truth my mother tore out." A long silence. The vines around Bailey trembled with the emperor's hunger. "Set it on the water," Malachar said. "Speak first." The emperor laughed, low and broken. "You were made a cage, boy. Not for me. For the swamp's first curse—the thing that made wardens in the beginning. Your mother sealed it inside you before your birth so it could never wake again. That is why you could not die. Kill the seal, and it walks free." Bailey's hands went cold. He set the lantern on the water. The glow slid down into the dark, and Malachar sighed like a man given bread after starving. "Where is the seal?" Bailey asked. "In your chest," Malachar said. "Where it always was." Bailey rowed back before dawn. He had the truth now, and it was worse than not knowing. He was not just a boy who couldn't age. He was a lock. And something behind that lock had been waiting a very long time to be opened.