The Assassin's Blade (The Archangel Trilogy: Book One) SAMPLE

I: ADELRIC

Adelric Biermann couldn't help but stare out the carriage window on the night his life changed forever.

The Überhaus, the pride of the city of Königstadt and Vorbereich's premier opera house, loomed right outside that window, a giant, glowing monolith amidst the darkened streets of the Vornehm neighborhood. It was absolutely massive, with columns that were easily twenty meters tall, grand windows, gargoyles on the roof's ledge, and a domed roof of oxidized copper that allowed for enough space for one of the largest opera houses in the world. It had taken ten years to build, ten of the worst years of Adelric's life: Manfred II, for reasons unknown, let the city tax the common people practically to death to get the funds for it, and since Adelric had been pretty young at the time, the ten years of starving had stunted his growth, leaving him unusually short. Five years later, if the papers could be believed, it was one of the grandest, most extravagant buildings in all the world, with enough goods in there to feed everybody in Königstadt's slums two meals a day for nearly a year.

Adelric forced himself to stop thinking about the wealth in that building. He couldn't steal anything that night. If people could connect him to that building after the job either by what he left or what he took, Bator would skin him alive before the police could.

He looked over at Klara Schultz, one of Bator's main bashers, who was sitting across the carriage from him. She'd taken off her glove and was tending to her mechanical hand, tightening up a few of the screws in the wrist part. It seemed that the old thing was giving her some trouble again; maybe this job would get her the money she needed for a new one, if she was willing to go through the pain of getting that one off and putting another one on.

"That's not a good idea, Klara," Adelric said. Normally, he wouldn't have said anything, but when she was messing with that greasy thing over a dress worth more than his life, he couldn't stay silent. "Bator will kill you if you get grease all over that dress. Do you have any idea how much those things cost?"

"One thousand five-hundred twenty-five marks for the dress, one-hundred marks for the stain resistant gloves, seventy-five marks for the shoes, four-hundred marks for the necklace, two-hundred marks for the earrings, and one-hundred fifty marks for each the hairpin an' the fan, both specialized," Klara said absentmindedly as she continued to tweak her arm. Her Gelynian accent was thick at the moment: it looked like she was going to wait to try and turn off her brogue. "You'll find that comes to a total of two-thousand six-hundred marks without taxes an' three-thousand one-hundred twenty marks including the tax."

She looked up at him with an annoyed look, gesturing at what Adelric was wearing with her small screwdriver. "That suit with all your trappings cost us four-thousand two-hundred marks, makin' this venture worth a gran' total of seven-thousand three-hundred twenty marks, an' that ain't even with the costs of weapons, transportation, or the tickets to get in."

Adelric must of looked as confused as he felt, because she just rolled her eyes at him as she continued to work on her hand.

"I handled the lot of marks for this job," Klara said, obviously annoyed. "You see, that's what happens when the boss knows that you ain't goin' ta go blow a bunch of marks on sheet music and the like."

Adelric looked out the window of the carriage as they made their final approach to the Überhaus. He'd always thought that Klara hated him, but he always wondered whether or not that was true. Now that the two of them were actually working with each other, he saw that it was even truer than he ever thought it would be. A friend had told him that she hated people born a little more fortunate than her, but Adelric wasn't exactly that much more fortunate than she was: the only difference, as far as he knew, was that she was a cyborg and that he'd had a skill that had kept him out of the underground for most of his life.