Bailey Baz's Arc

Chapter 8 of 44

The ferret sank into the black water. Its jaws still clicked Malachar's threat. Cora, or the deep water. Bailey stared at the spot where it vanished. The totem was already gone through the mud. He could speak the rite from the shore and never learn what he was. Or he could follow the vines down, into the emperor's reach, and get his answer before he sealed the door forever. He chose the water. He tucked the old book under a rotted plank. Then he slid off the dock into the reeds. The vines pulled him along a sunken path, past drowned roots, down where light died. He held his breath and did not need to. He never had, in a hundred years. That fact was part of the truth he came to steal. The deep water opened into a green-lit hollow. Malachar hung in the vines like a fly in a web. Gray beard, red robe, wrists bound in living cords. The totem floated near his chest, drawn by the strand. He smiled when he saw Bailey. "You came whole," the emperor said. "Good boy." "Not for you," Bailey said. "Tell me why I don't age. Then I close you in." Malachar laughed. The vines shook. "You think it a gift. It is a leash. The swamp froze your years so the debt could grow inside you. A hundred years of it, packed in your bones. That is what a warden is. A jar for someone else's punishment." Bailey's hands went cold. "Mine? Whose?" "Mine," Malachar said. "Every year you did not age, my sentence passed to you. Break the freeze and you die. Keep it and you are my vessel forever. There is no third road, boy." Bailey looked at the totem drifting toward the emperor's fingers. He understood now. He was carrying Malachar's debt inside his own body. That was the truth. It did not free him. It chained him tighter. “One more thing,” Malachar mentioned. “The reason you do not age is because I killed you. The ten year old nephew of mine, many years later; set to take my throne one day. You were lost in this swamp, but needles to say, you’d never return.” But the totem was here. He was here. The rite worked only here. He had one thing the emperor did not expect. He knew the true binding line. Malachar's hand closed on the totem. "Now speak the words," the emperor said, sure of his win. "Speak, and the totem is mine to break." Bailey spoke. Not the freeing line the emperor wanted. The other one, from the tower, decoded from the book. The deep binding. The vines surged. They wrapped Malachar's arms, his throat, his mouth. The totem tore from his grip and sank. The emperor screamed once, then the cords pulled him down into the dark, deeper than before. The hollow went still. Bailey floated alone in green light. He had his answer. He was a jar for a tyrant's years. He had sealed the tyrant away. And the debt still sat inside him, a hundred years heavy, with no way out that did not kill him.