Dead Man's Grade: A Progression Fantasy Crime Thriller (Warrant, Book One): 1

In Corbel your class is licensed, not earned.Sabin Roke has shored collapsing tunnels under the city for nine years and he is better at it than any warranted man alive, which is worth two marks a day, because the Assize turned him down twice and the Assize does not explain itself.Then he finds a body in a flooded gallery - a Shorewright, stabbed, with sound ground overhead and a warrant still folded against his chest.The mark takes eleven seconds to set. It does not ask his name. It reads his hand - the order he sets a prop in, which side he braces from, which fist takes the wedge - and it does not care whose arm it is on, and it never has.Thirty marks a day. Four hundred marks buys his sister out of indenture. Six weeks, and nobody checks, because in four hundred years nobody has ever needed to.But a warrant remembers the hand it was issued to, and Ozias Fen was right-handed, and every Grade Sabin gains pushes him further from a dead man he never met. The figure only ever rises. At twenty the warrant refuses him in public. At forty the Assize opens the Roll - where his own hand has been filed, twice, in his own name, since he was twenty years old.Two numbers, racing. One of them buys his sister a life. The other one is a rope.Inside: - Progression fantasy with no magic system - just a licence and a hand - A murder, a stolen class, and a countdown that only ever climbs - A working-class hero who wins on craft, not chosen-one luck - A drowned gaslamp city with real law, real money and real rent - No harem, and a complete arc in one bookDead Man's Grade is Book One of Warrant. Read free in Kindle Unlimited.