Chapter 35: Rumors

Chapter 35: Chapter 35: Rumors

Dex picked up on the first ring.

"Finally," he said. "I thought they’d gotten to you."

"I was asleep."

"You were asleep? I sent you three texts at two in the morning saying Ironfang came to my apartment, and you were asleep?"

"First time in a while," Elias said. "Who came?"

He heard Dex take a breath and steady himself. "Vance. And Rourke, the big tank with the neck tattoo. Knocked on my door around midnight, all smiles. Said Garrick wanted to make sure I was doing okay during my suspension." Dex’s laugh had no humor in it. "Garrick has never once in his life wanted to make sure anybody was okay."

"What did they ask?"

"Where you live. Whether I’d seen you. Whether you’d been hanging out with anybody new." A pause. "Then Vance pulls up that Masked Summoner video on his phone and goes, ’Crazy, right? Right by your buddy’s sister’s hospital.’ And he watches my face the whole time, like he’s waiting to see what it does."

Elias’s grip tightened on the phone. "What did you say?"

"I said, ’Elias? Elias can barely carry a forty-kilo pack up a flight of stairs.’ Which, by the way, is true." Dex’s voice dropped. "Eli. What’s going on?"

"Nothing you need to worry about."

"That’s what people say right before something I need to worry about happens." When Elias didn’t answer, Dex sighed. "Fine. Then here’s something you do need to worry about. You know Kelly’s, the porters’ bar on Dock Street? I was there last night before they came. Everybody’s talking about you."

"About me?"

"About the cathedral. Ironfang’s telling everyone you panicked in the boss room. That you dropped the loot packs, ran, and left Brody and Colt to burn. That you hid behind the wall until the boss died and then walked out with the cathedral loot in your pockets." Dex’s voice was tight with anger. "They’re saying you stole from the guild. That’s why you’ve suddenly got money for your sister."

The room went very quiet.

Elias thought about Garrick’s stone palm against his chest. The wall going up, brick by brick. Porters draw aggro. Nothing personal, Pierce. He thought about Brody’s shield melting, and Dex clawing at the stone while Vance dragged him away.

They’d taken the truth, turned it inside out, and hung it around his neck.

"Eli? You there?"

"I’m here."

"I told them it was garbage. I told everyone at Kelly’s it was garbage." Dex paused. "Not everybody believed me. Ironfang’s a B-rank guild, and you’re an E-rank porter nobody’s ever heard of. You know how that goes."

He did know. He’d known his whole life.

"Thanks, Dex," he said quietly. "Lock your door tonight."

The plan had been simple. Marcus wanted a legitimate road, and the most legitimate thing Elias knew was porter work. A few days a week carrying bags for a decent guild would put honest money on the books and give the Association a boring explanation for where he spent his time.

So at ten that morning, he walked into the Merridan Guild Exchange, a converted bank on Calder Street where guilds posted jobs on a long digital board and hired porters, scouts, and support hunters on the spot.

He’d come here a hundred times. He knew the hiring agents by name.

The first one was Barlow from Stonewatch, a solid C-rank guild with a decent reputation. Barlow had hired him twice the year before. Elias walked up to his desk, and Barlow looked up, saw who it was, and his face closed like a door.

"No porter work today," Barlow said.

"The board says you need three for a D-rank clear tomorrow."

"Board’s wrong." Barlow looked back down at his tablet. "Try somewhere else, Pierce."

The second was a woman from the Ember Coil guild who didn’t even let him finish his sentence. The third, an older agent from a small guild called Harrow’s Reach, was at least honest about it.

He sighed, turned his tablet around, and showed it to Elias.

It was the Exchange’s porter registry. Elias’s file, his photo from three years ago, his license number. And under it, a red flag he’d never seen before, posted twelve days ago:

FLAGGED BY: Ironfang Guild. REASON: Abandonment of team during active raid. Suspected theft of guild loot. RECOMMENDATION: Do not hire.

"I’m sorry, son," the agent said quietly. "I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t much like Garrick Holt, if I’m honest. But no guild in this city is going to hire a porter with an Ironfang flag on his file. Not while Ironfang’s still a B-rank." He turned the tablet back around. "It’s not personal."

Elias almost laughed.

He walked out of the Exchange into the grey morning and stood on the steps for a long time, his hands in his jacket pockets, watching porters and hunters stream past him through the doors. Some of them glanced at him. A couple whispered. One, a kid he’d carried packs beside on a raid last spring, looked right at him, then looked away.

Abandonment of team during active raid.

He could feel something stirring in the back of his mind, faint and far away. Not words. Just a sense of the three of them in the Sanctum, standing very still, as if they’d heard something they didn’t like.

The Association exchange was worse. The clerk who’d scanned his scraps for weeks without looking up looked up this time. He went through every pea-sized core one by one under a magnifier, logged each of them separately, and asked twice where Elias had gotten them.

"A D-rank gate," Elias said. "Solo. It’s in the log."

"Uh-huh," said the clerk, and wrote something down that Elias couldn’t see.

By noon, he understood. Ironfang hadn’t just spread a rumor. They had closed every door in Merridan except the ones that led back to gates and Ozzie’s. And Ozzie had told him to stay away.

It was a cage, he realized. A quiet one, built out of other people’s opinions. And Garrick was the one who’d built it.

In the Ironfang office, Garrick Holt sat behind his desk the size of a dining table and listened to Vance report.

The archer stood by the window with his arms folded, the bruise Dex had given him faded to a yellow smudge. Rourke, the tank with the neck tattoo, leaned against the door.

"The friend knows something," Vance said. "Moreau. He lied too fast. But he’s not the interesting part." He tossed a folded paper onto the desk. "Osgood Brill. Runs a salvage shop in the Market District. Over the last six weeks, he’s moved at least five D-rank boss cores to private collectors, maybe more. Before that, he hadn’t touched anything above E-rank scrap in two years."

Garrick unfolded the paper. A list of sale dates and estimated prices. "So?"

"So Rourke sat in the noodle shop across from Brill’s place for three days." Vance nodded at the tank. "Tell him."

"Your porter," Rourke said. "Walked in yesterday with something wrapped in a dish towel. Walked out with a bank bag. Went straight to Merridan General and came out without it." He shrugged. "Whatever was in the towel, it paid for a lot of hospital."

Garrick didn’t say anything for a while.

Then he pulled up the Fifth Street video on his monitor and watched it again. He had watched it a dozen times since Marsh’s message arrived. The hooded figure on the stairs, head down. The left arm in a bandage. The way it moved, quick and light, the way porters never moved, because porters carried forty kilos and learned to walk like mules.

He thought about the boss room. The Ossuary King, the censer, the chain. He had sealed that wall with his own hands, and he had known. He had known that porter was dead.

And the porter had walked out.

Garrick had told himself it was luck. An irregular burning itself out, a coward hiding behind a pillar. He’d built the rumor around that story and believed half of it himself. But you didn’t buy three months of hospital with luck. You didn’t move five boss cores through a salvage shop with luck. And you didn’t get a council member texting you at midnight, Your porter has friends now. One of them wears armor.

The porter wasn’t just alive.

He was getting stronger. Fast. And sooner or later, someone, maybe Crane, maybe the Lodestar, would sit him down in a quiet room and ask what really happened in the Drowned Cathedral. And this time, he wouldn’t have a reason to say I don’t remember.

Garrick looked down. His right hand was resting on the desk, and it was shaking again, very slightly. He watched it the way he’d watch a monster at the edge of a gate, waiting for it to stop.

It didn’t stop.

"Boss?" said Vance.

Garrick opened his desk drawer, took out a phone he kept for calls that didn’t happen, and scrolled through its short list of contacts to a name he had hoped never to need again.

Kessler.

"Get out," he told Vance and Rourke. "Both of you. And close the door."