The Forsaken Scavenger’s Rise to Godhood

Chapter 6

Chapter 6: The Man Who Bought the City

The boy's name was Wick, and he was dying.

Mira got them into a safe cellar under the bookbinder's shop. The old man, Tobin, took one look at Wick's neck and swore. "Blackroot. They put it in his water. It spreads until the heart stops."

"Can you stop it?" Zephyr asked.

"Slow it. Salt, hot water, and your brother's fever tonic, if you can spare it." Tobin met his eyes. "It's a bad trade."

Zephyr gave up half a bottle. Rowan's fever had dropped, and he was asleep on a cot with color in his face for the first time in weeks. Wick's black veins stopped climbing. They didn't recede.

"Three days," Tobin said. "Then he needs a real cure, and only Cassian's people have it."

Zephyr stared at the wall. He had saved one child and doomed another, and Cassian had done both with a single bucket of water.

"I'm done running," he said.

Mira looked up from her papers. "Good. What are you going to do?"

"Hit his business."

---

Everything Cassian owned ran on one thing: licenses. Every scavenger needed a stamped license to sell a relic legally. Cassian signed them, so Cassian decided who ate. If a crew refused his prices, he revoked their paper, and they either starved or sold to his black-market buyers at half value.

"He doesn't own Nethralis," Zephyr said. "He owns everyone's permission to work in it."

"So take the permission away," Mira said slowly.

"Better. Show people it was never his to give."

Tobin knew where to start. Cassian confiscated artifacts from crews who couldn't pay license fees, then stored them at the old Harbor Customs House, abandoned for years. Hundreds of crates, supposedly held for auction. Nobody ever saw them sold.

"If those crates are what I think they are," Zephyr said, "they're proof he's been stealing from his own licensed crews."

"Customs House will have guards," Mira warned.

"Four, I counted. And I know eleven scavengers who lost everything to Cassian's fees."

---

It took two days to find them. Zephyr limped through the Ash District on his splinted leg, knocking on doors. Most people slammed them in his face. The notice with his name was everywhere.

But a woman named Dessa, a big, scarred salvager who had lost her crew's equipment to a "f*e dispute," let him talk for one minute.

"Everyone says you killed eleven people," she said.

"Three people died. I buried them myself." He held her gaze. "Cassian killed them. He's done worse to you."

Dessa chewed her lip. "What do I get?"

"Your gear back. Everyone's gear back. And proof that he stole it."

She spat on the ground and grinned. "I'll bring six."

By dusk, nine scavengers crouched in the shadow of the Customs House. Zephyr gave each one a job. Two climbed to the roof. Three cut the lock on the loading bay. Dessa and her crew handled the guards.

"Nobody dies," Zephyr said. "Tie them up, take their keys, move fast."

It worked better than it should have. The guards were bored, half-asleep, and unprepared for nine angry people coming from three directions. Dessa knocked one cold with a pipe. Another surrendered when she sat on him.

Inside, the warehouse was enormous and dark. Crates stacked to the rafters. Stamped on each one were names Zephyr recognized, crews he'd drunk with at the Rusted Cup, labeled with the date their equipment had been "seized."

"Look at this," Dessa said, pulling a lid open. Inside lay a surveyor's brass level, polished and wrapped in cloth. "That's Hodd's. He lost it three years ago. They told him it was auctioned."

"It was never auctioned," Zephyr said. "Cassian just kept it."

They loaded wagons for an hour. Then Mira, flipping through a stack of ledgers from the office, made a small noise.

"Zephyr. Come look at this."

She showed him a ledger page. Dates, payments, and names. Cassian had been buying and selling confiscated relics for years. Not to collectors, but to a single buyer.

"Who?"

She turned the page toward him. At the bottom was a stamped seal, a circle of light with a sunburst in the center.

"The Sanctum of the First Light," Mira whispered. "The Church."

Zephyr stared. The Church publicly condemned relic trading. They burned scavengers for owning forbidden artifacts.

"Find the crates," he said. "Whatever he sold them."

It took five minutes. In a sealed back room, behind a false wall, sat a dozen long wooden boxes. Dessa pried one open with a crowbar.

Inside lay weapons. Swords, spears, and short axes, every blade etched with glowing sigils. Real relic weapons, banned by law, with the sunburst crest stamped into every hilt.

"The Church is buying forbidden relics," Dessa said hoarsely. "While they're hanging people for touching them."

Zephyr picked up a sword. The sigils pulsed faintly under his fingers. The cold weight in his chest pulsed back.

"Load it all," he said. "Every crate. And somebody find me a printing press."

---

By dawn, the evidence was out.

Tobin knew a printer who owed Zephyr's father a favor. Within six hours, handbills were plastered across the Ash District, the docks, and the Salt Quarter. Each one listed the stolen equipment by crew name, with a copy of Cassian's own ledger page. The last line carried the Church's seal.

Scavengers crowded the Customs House, finding their own tools in the crates. People cried. A man named Hodd held his old brass level against his chest and wept openly.

For one morning, Zephyr felt something he hadn't felt in years. People looked at him like he had done something good.

Then Dessa came running, her face tight.

"Cassian's men are going door to door. They're burning out everyone who helped us."

Zephyr's stomach dropped. "How many?"

"Dozens. Maybe more." She grabbed his arm. "They know who we are. I counted nine of my crew on that list."

He had won the first round, and the price was already being collected. He'd handed Cassian a list of every person who dared to stand with him.

"Get them out of the district," Zephyr said. "Take the wagons, take the supplies, go to the old tannery. Mira will meet you."

"And you?"

"I'm checking the last crate."

He didn't know why he said it. He only knew there was one box left in the back room, smaller than the rest, bound in black iron instead of wood. The others had been opened. This one sat untouched.

Zephyr broke the lock with the crowbar.

Inside lay a single folded document sealed with red wax. The wax was cracked and old. A woman's handwriting covered the outer page, small and precise.

He read the signature at the bottom.

His hands began to shake.

Aelira Kaelith.

His mother.