the fire shield, almost falling out into the cave. He had his visor down and could barely see. Gaizal fell sideways off the scorpion and disappeared. There was another roar. Meteroa slipped into the firing seat simply to steady himself. He looked sideways for Gaizal but that was a waste of time. Through tiny slits lined with blurred glass, he’d be lucky to see a dragon standing right in front of him. The world wasn’t bright though, which meant the flames were gone.
He lifted the visor. He could see Gaizal now, lying on the floor beside the scorpion. He was very still. His helmet had fallen off and he was staring wide-eyed at the mouth of the cave.
‘Bolt,’ he mouthed. Mechanically, Meteroa loaded another bolt into the scorpion. He lifted the fire shield up by a few inches and peered out.
There was a dragon right in front of him, its head and one clawed limb jammed in through the mouth of the cave, blocking the entrance, thrashing for purchase. The other two scorpions that had been in the cave were gone. It took Meteroa a moment to realise, but a substantial chunk of the cave was gone too.
‘Bolt,’ mouthed Gaizal again. The dragon wasn’t really looking at them. Meteroa could feel its rage growing every second. Is it stuck? He started to chuckle at the absurdity of it.
The dragon’s eye, the one that Meteroa could see, swivelled to look straight at him. Golden, the size of a man’s head, with a long vertical slit of a pupil, a thin black window to the dragon’s soul, it stared at him.
‘You are stuck, aren’t you?’ Meteroa threw back the fire shield and cranked the scorpion around. The dragon’s struggles grew more urgent. It lunged forward, trying to get at him. Stupid thing was still trying to get in, not out.
‘See now, if you were a hunting-dragon, that would have worked. But you’re not. You’re a war-dragon. Of course, if you were a hunting-dragon, you probably wouldn’t have got stuck in the first place.’ The scorpion was aimed straight at the dragon’s eye. The one weak spot. Meteroa fired. The dragon’s eye burst and a man’s height of barbed wood and steel buried itself in the monster’s head. All the struggles stopped. The dragon hung where it was, dangling by its head and claw for a moment. Meteroa tried to imagine how hard the dragon must have hit the cave to wedge itself in like that. Tried. Failed.
There was a cracking sound from the mouth of the cave and then a grinding, and then the dragon was gone, taking a chunk of the cave mouth with it. Meteroa couldn’t help himself. He reached out a hand, helped Gaizal to his feet and then walked to the edge and peered down, watching the dragon fall towards the ground.
‘I reckon that’s that for those scorpions,’ he said.
Gaizal stared beside him at the falling dragon. ‘You killed a dragon,’ he gasped, full of awe.
‘Yes.’ Meteroa frowned. ‘I suppose I did.’ Wasn’t this the sort of thing they made into stories? Although he wasn’t sure it would be much of one. What will it say? That the dragon walked up to within a dozen yards of my scorpion and then obligingly stood still for as long as it took for me to pick my spot and aim? Which is pretty much what happened. No, that won’t do.
The other thought which came along with the first was that he’d better keep Gaizal alive for long enough to start telling people a better one, otherwise no one would ever know.
‘Your Highness!’ The world suddenly lurched and spun. For a moment he had no idea what had happened, then he was lying flat on the cave floor. Not falling the several thousand feet to the Silver City far below. That was good.
Gaizal was lying on top of him.
‘What the…’ What in the name of your unholy ancestors were you doing? That’s what he’d been going to say, right up until he saw a hunting-dragon’s wing arc past the cave. ‘Tail?’ he asked, shaken. Gaizal nodded. They both scrabbled away from the edge. At the back of the cave Meteroa stopped and looked over his shoulder. ‘There’s still one scorpion working here,’ he said. He looked at the mangled ruins of the others. The riders who’d manned them lay about like broken dolls. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened to them, except that they hadn’t been quick enough to retreat from the cave mouth when the dragon crashed in.
Gaizal didn’t say anything. Meteroa weighed up his options and then shrugged. Killing Tichane’s riders and even his dragons was all well and good, but the point, he had to remind himself, was to defend the fortress. The only way in, as far as Meteroa could see, was either up through the tunnels or down from above. And if even Zafir didn’t know the way in from below and the only way in from the Grand Stair was barred, then that left getting in through the scorpion caves. Meteroa couldn’t quite see how they would do such a thing. Presumably on very long ropes, except most of the caves had overhanging roofs which would make attackers ridiculously easy to pick off one by one as they tried to swing inside. So far, no one had even tried.
I killed a dragon. The thought echoed in his head over and over, filling him with energy and purpose. He felt dangerously invincible. He turned back to the cave mouth in time to see another three dragons flying straight towards it. Two of them were carrying large cages in their back claws. The sky behind them was blue and clear and filled with sunlight. He suppressed a laugh. It was a nice day outside. Or would have been, if it wasn’t filled with dragons,
‘Bolt!’ shouted Gaizal. Meteroa found himself jumping onto the scorpion in reflex. He had a bolt in his hands and Gaizal was already at the cocking crank. They weren’t going to be able to move the scorpion up to the front of the cave any more. He could see that now. The rail was buckled from the impact of the dragon. Not that it mattered, since the dragons were coming straight in again. He couldn’t help but wonder what the cages were for. They looked like slave cages, but he couldn’t fathom what Tichane might be doing with his slave-soldiers up here.
‘Ready!’ Gaizal sat down into the firing seat and started to turn the scorpion. They had a few seconds, Meteroa decided, before the first dragon was close enough to burn them. The reach of a drag-on’s fire – another thing you learned by not dying. Most people didn’t understand what it took to be a dragon-knight. How many accidents there were. A careless flick of a tail and a lord’s son was dead, just like that. And as for fire, well, there was simply no way to learn about dragon-fire except to feel it. It always amazed Meteroa how many knights didn’t check that every part of their armour was locked together properly. Half the riders who came through his eyries were cripples before he was done training them.
The front dragon had several riders on its back. They weren’t even trying to use the dragon to shield themselves. Because they think we’re all dead? Meteroa permitted himself a vicious little grin as Gaizal fired the scorpion, neatly skewering the lead rider. He deserved it. Yes. When you spend most of your life working around dragons, you learn not to take chances. He pulled the fire shield down and waited as the flames washed around him. When he lifted the shield and peeked past it, the first dragon was gone. The second, though, was heading right for the cave mouth. He slammed down the shield a second time, but instead of more fire, there was a pause and then a crashing splintering sound. Meteroa peered out from behind the shield again. There were men in his cave. About a dozen of them. Lightly armoured soldiers, screaming and shouting amid a tangle of smashed wooden poles and ropes. Several of them looked quite badly hurt. In fact, now that he looked again, several of them weren’t moving at all.
They threw a cage full of slaves at me? He couldn’t help but stare, incredulous, as the last of the three dragons tossed another cage towards the cave and veered sharply away, so close its wings almost brushed the face of the stone outside.
To Meteroa, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The cage turned slowly in the air. It clipped the roof of the cave entrance and immediately disintegrated. Parts of it, including several poorly armed soldiers, kept going, cartwheeling into the cave; most of it bounced against the bottom lip of the cave and spun away. A brief chorus of screams vanished into the void outside.
Several men managed to disentangle themselves from the wreckage. Meteroa screamed, jumped out from behind the shield of the scorpion and ran at them with his sword. They were so confused or injured or just plain stupid that he cut two of them down before they gathered their wits and realised they were under attack. A third managed to draw a short sword to defend himself, but all he was ever going to manage with that was to fend off Meteroa’s own sword. An axe, boy. You need an axe if you’re up against dragon-scale. That or a scorpion or a really good bow. Meteroa concentrated on putting down the half-alive soldiers who might have managed to make a nuisance of themselves if they ever managed to get up off the floor. After that, he slowly backed the last soldier into a corner. Here he paused.
‘You can’t possibly have volunteered for this,’ he shouted. ‘Look at you! Half crippled from being thrown in here by a dragon. You can barely fight and even if you could, look at what they gave you! What are you? One of Valmeyan’s slave-soldiers? Did they promise you your freedom if you managed to open the doors for them? How
