DEAD WEIGHT: Paladin: Dead Weight, #2

By M Todd Gallowglas

Can you justify doing bad things for the right reason?

This is the second installment of the serialized novel DEAD WEIGHT, set within the world of THE FAERIE WAR.

Cendrine South is on the run. Oberon, the King of Faerie, has tasked his agents with capturing the half-faerie renegade. For what purpose, Cendrine does not know...she only knows she doesn't want to find out. She knows that powers that be from both Earth and Faerie have secret agendas, and all of this has something to do with the battered journal she’s inherited. It holds secrets from during and before the war, secrets that just might stop hostilities from erupting again.

And what of Boy Scout’s friend, Tommy? It seems he didn't die all those years ago. What part does he play the tale of two worlds at war?

Remember: Not all faerie tales have happy endings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bard's Cloak of Tales
• Release date: Jul 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781501443299

Book preview

For Jason Roberts

More than anyone else, he planted the seeds that changed the way I thought about writing forever.

Acknowledgements

Here we are again, the hardest part of the book, where I thank all those who had a hand in it.

First and foremost, I’m going to thank Will and all the other nice baristas at my local Starbucks for putting up with me and keeping the caffeine flowing while I was working on this one. If not for them faithfully filling my cup, I might have actually stalled out on this one. To a lesser extent, the late-night servers at Mel’s down the way also deserve some credit for putting up with me in the later hours.

Thanks to my beta readers, Ash, Frances, and Chris.

And again, thanks to Christopher Kellen, my indie writer partner in crime for the surreal, yet awesome, introduction to this volume.

To all those who got the advance copy of DEAD WEIGHT: The Tombs and posted reviews: I truly believe my early success with this one is because you guys stepped up and helped get the word out.

Cody and Jenni: Without you guys, I don’t think I’d have stayed sane enough at all those cons and ren faires to finish this one.

To all my writer friends, too many of you to name at this point, or the list might take up a volume of its own: Thanks for all the support, encouragement, and giving me the occasional shout out.

Again, to Joe, Hoover, Victor, and all the other amateur warriors at Vacaville Airsoft, for letting me shoot them, and for shooting me in return...all so I could up the scale of my fight scenes.

Finally, to my family: Robin, my ever-awesome wife, for asking, Is it done yet? Robert and Mathew, my boys, for helping me be silly so I could blow off steam. Megan, for always being adorable when just when I need it the most.

FORWARD: A WARNING

Greetings, intrepid reader. Welcome to the second installment of DEAD WEIGHT, entitled Paladin. If you have the fortitude, read on; but I warn you, what is contained within these pages is not for the faint-of-heart.

If this is the first DEAD WEIGHT book that you have stumbled upon: stop immediately, go back and locate a copy of The Tombs. While you could theoretically proceed without that background knowledge, you would find yourself lost and adrift within a story which has already launched itself and taken wing amidst the darkest parts of imagination. If you are brave enough to lay eyes upon what lies within, surely you should see the story through from the beginning.

Before we begin, a word. For this book, as it was with The Tombs, our guide is M. Todd Gallowglas, a man of no small infamy. While in previous works he showed signs of literary sociopathy, and committed an ever-growing number of literary crimes: the murder of well-liked characters, larceny of fictional locales, dabbling in the dark realms of magic and unknown deities, blood sacrifice, knowing and deliberate appropriation of public-domain works and characters—the list of charges goes on—never as clearly as among the pages of DEAD WEIGHT have Gallowglas’s true colors shone as brightly.

The man is, quite frankly, a menace. Ensnaring hapless readers into arching webs of lies, intrigue and deceit—which he is so brazen as to call works of fiction—the suspension of disbelief that he mercilessly squeezes from his readers serves nothing but to fuel the fires of the dark gods to whom he has pledged his undying allegiance.

The tale which lies behind is one such trap. I cannot stop you from daring to turn the page and reading on, but neither can I guarantee that you shall emerge on the other side unscathed. What lies within is stark, brutal, uncaring of niceties, and disregarding of sensitivities. You may find yourself, when the last page is turned, both filled with an unquenchable hunger to read more... and a certain emptiness, for part of yourself has been left amongst the sentences and paragraphs and pages, lost forever to Gallowglas’s dark magic.

What lies within these pages is not for the faint of heart. It is not for those who are easily offended, and it is most certainly NOT FOR CHILDREN. The details of the Faerie War may sound like a childhood fancy, a tale fit to warn the young of the perils of life, but let me assure you that it is not. Though the author, M. Todd Gallowglas, has forged himself a reputation as a family-friendly storyteller via his live storytelling act and his Halloween Jack yarns, full of light-hearted and clever trickery, DEAD WEIGHT is none of those. It is stark, uncompromising, and should only be gazed upon by the eyes of the bravest and most determined readers.

If what you seek is a happy ending, a pleasant escape from reality, or a flight of fancy to carry you to another world where you may visit briefly and then promptly forget everything you have seen: LOOK ELSEWHERE. The story beyond is one which by the end will leave you hungering for more, yet also oddly empty, for you will have left something of yourself among the sentences and paragraphs. The events spoken of within this book may shock you—and they will most certainly haunt you.

I have done all I can. If you yet choose to go on, I cannot stop you, only hope that perhaps some fragment of my warning will remain in your mind. If you choose to turn the page, you take your fate into your own hands, for there will be nothing that anyone can do to stop you, before your mind is forever burdened by the tale of the Paladin. Perhaps, one day, some lucky reader will be the first to escape, unaffected, from Gallowglas’s clutches.

For it was not I.

You are forewarned and forearmed with the best that I can give you. Good luck, intrepid reader. Good luck, and good reading.

Christopher Kellen

July, 2014

...while I discovered that my own exploration of Faerieland had only just begun. In the countryside, the old stories seemed to come alive around me; the faeries were a tangible aspect of the landscape, pulses of spirit, emotion, and light. They insisted on taking form under my pencil, emerging on the page before me cloaked in archetypal shapes drawn from nature and myth. I'd attracted their attention, you see, and they hadn’t finished with me yet.

― Brian Froud

Non nobis solum nati sumus.

(Not for ourselves alone are we born.)

― Cicero

A QUIET PLACE TO READ

I hope you are the reader this book is waiting for.

— Jorge Luis Borges

When you’ve burned the bridges behind you, don’t go starting a fire on the one in front of you.

― Steven Erikson, The Bonehunters

You can have peace.

Or you can have freedom.

Don’t ever count on having both at once.

― Robert A. Heinlein

––––––––

Cendrine ended her song and cradled her father’s head in her lap.

He had stopped breathing at some point while she sang. His eyes stared up at nothing. The corners of his mouth turned slightly upward in a contented smile.

She eased out from under his head and placed it on the floor as gently as she might have if he’d been asleep rather than...she couldn’t finish that thought. Tears slid down her cheeks as she closed her father’s eyes.

So that she didn’t feel like a complete tool in looting his body, Cendrine convinced herself she was keeping the bad guys from getting his things as she took his glass gun, dirk, and dog tags. She slipped the weapons into her belt, dirk at her side and gun at the small of her back. As for the dog tags, she almost put them in the pocket of her peacock feathered coat, then changed her mind and slid them over her head and tucked them underneath her orange shirt. While she couldn’t take his body with her – she wouldn’t know what to do with it, even if she had time – she wasn’t going to leave him to be looted by whoever came along.

His last words played in her mind as she picked up his battered leather journal. Run. They will know when I die. They’ll come here. Read...read Tommy’s story. Find him. Then find...and protect...the next champion.

She wanted to read it here. The book contained answers to so many questions. Not just about this mysterious Tommy and her father, the journal talked about her mother and held secrets at the core of the Faerie War. However, this was not the time, nor the place.

After slipping the journal into her pocket, Cendrine knelt over her father, kissed his forehead again, and stood up.

In her whole life, with all the twists and turns of living in and out of Faerie, Cendrine South had only been cold in one other moment. She hated the sensation. Fire and warmth was the stuff of life. Passion, in all its forms, burned from action and experience. This debilitating chill threatened to stifle her inner fire. It wasn’t sadness, or sorrow, or any other names for grief that existed in the mutable and ever-growing English tongue. Even those emotions contained heat, for they could burn as bright and full as any lust, or rage, or joy. No, for her, human death sapped away all passion, setting a seeping cold into her joints, though it only happened with those closest to her.

While Cendrine knew in her logical mind that Oberon’s agents would be coming to verify her father’s death and then to seek out his heir to his role between the courts, she could only bring herself to move slightly faster than perhaps a snail’s pace. Her logical mind knew she had to do something about this lethargy. If Oberon’s lackeys found Cendrine, they would try to take her. If they succeeded, finding and protecting the next Unseelie champion would be problematic at best. She needed to overcome this chill settling over her spirit.

There.

Fire.

On the other side of the room, the flames still trapped the surviving witch. Those would do nicely.

Cendrine snapped her fingers and beckoned the flames to her. They came happily, more than willingly, leaping, spinning, and dancing through the air toward Cendrine, eager to ignite her passion and stamp out the terrible chill setting into her joints. As the flames reached her, Cendrine wrapped them around her. First, she burned her father’s blood from her skin and clothes. Once clean, she inhaled the flames. The more of the fire she drew into herself, the less and less the flames obstructed her view of the witch cowering on the far side of the room.

The warmth spread from Cendrine’s throat and lungs. She stepped over her father’s body and walked toward the witch. As she went, hindsight flashed little hints and clues at Cendrine. Though dressed like whores, the witches hadn’t been completely comfortable in those clothes, moving awkwardly or not at all. Not that it would have helped much or changed anything had she realized it sooner. She’d known they were probably walking into a trap.

The witch raised her head. She looked around as if waking from a drunken stupor, blinking and confused, as if finding herself in unfamiliar surroundings. She might have been anywhere from her late teens to her early twenties. Her scant clothes and makeup added years, while her tears and blubbering took them away. Cendrine hadn’t known Sunshine well, but she did know that he couldn’t possibly have kept seven mages and seven witches on retainer. That left only one logical explanation for their presence here: Oberon.

Cendrine took a few steps to the pool table and placed her hand on the felt. It leapt into flames. Cendrine breathed in the heat and the smoke.

Please, the witch pleaded.

No, Cendrine said.

The fire leapt from the pool table across the room to envelope the witch. She screamed as her skin charred in some places and bubbled in others. The moment before the witch’s brain and organs cooked beyond the point of functioning, Cendrine pulled the flames away. These might come in handy, so rather than let the heat disperse into the