by Stephen Deas
A learning experience. All because we didn’t know how to work them. At least, not properly. But now . . . now we know better.
Three dragons flew straight at the cave. Meteroa gritted his teeth. They can’t reach me, they can’t reach me. Beside him, Gaizal calmly cranked the scorpion a little to the left and a little up. He fired. The recoil was vicious, rattling Meteroa’s bones as he tried to watch the bolt to its target. The air tasted of iron.
Scorpions. Meteroa had hundreds and hundreds of them. Tichane had destroyed dozens, and it simply didn’t matter. Meteroa was more likely to run out of people to shoot them.
‘You missed.’
‘Hit the dragon,’ said Gaizal calmly. ‘Now he’s an angry dragon. These scorpions are really hurting them. Bolt please.’
Meteroa handed him another bolt. Together they put their weight behind the cocking mechanism and levered it open again. In steady calm movements, the way we always trained. Paying as little attention as we can to the dragon that’s about to kill us.
The mechanism clacked into place and the new bolt dropped home. Gaizal spun wheels that turned the scorpion back to the right and up some more. The dragons were a few hundred yards away now and closing fast. Any moment now.
The bolt fired. One rider on the closest dragon lurched as a six-foot rod of sharpened steel struck him in the hip and speared him to his mount. Meteroa had just enough time to see a second rider have his head torn clean off by another bolt before the dragons opened their mouths. He must have sensed it coming, somehow, because he was already pulling the fire shield down over himself and the scorpion and cranking the lever that propelled them away from the light and towards the back of the cave. It took us an hour of being slaughtered to realise how to do that. He cringed and muttered a prayer to his ancestors.
Prince Lai built these scorpions. The realisation reached him at much the same time as a wall of fire shook the cave, scouring its walls. Each cave had three scorpions. Each scorpion was on an iron rail that ran from the front of its cave to the back. At the front, it had an open field of view and a wide arc of fire. When a dragon came close, the scorpion withdrew to the back, out of reach of tooth and claw.
But not out of reach of fire. For that there was the shield. It hadn’t taken long at all to discover those – hinged slabs of dragon-scale that wrapped the scorpion in a fireproof cocoon. Meteroa had never seen scorpions as big as these. Big enough to make a dragon scream.
The stifling scorched air drained away. Meteroa was vaguely surprised to find that he was still alive and in fact unhurt. Cautiously he lifted the fire shield up. The cave entrance was clear.
Prince Lai got it right. Meteroa couldn’t help but smile. You’ve got more dragons out there than I have riders. I’m really supposed to have lost already. Yet here I am in an impregnable fortress armed with the weapons designed by the Prince of War himself. Here I am, Tichane! Come and take me, if you can. Vishmir and Prince Lai had fought the first Valmeyan here, around the the Pinnacles, during the War of Thorns. The most famous battle in history, between the greatest dragon-knights the world had ever seen. And here I am, with another Valmeyan outside, gifted these presents by my ancestors . . .
‘Bolt please.’ The scorpion was already riding forward on its rail. Meteroa lifted another bolt – they were surprisingly heavy – from the crate slung at the back of the weapon and started on the arming lever. That took both of them with all of their strength to crank back ready to fire again. Two dragons flashed across the mouth of the cave right in front of them. The scorpion shook as Gaizal fired. Missed. In the middle distance another dragon bucked and screamed and veered towards them. The other two scorpions in the cave fired in unison. The noise was like a thunderclap.
‘Missed.’
‘Are you sure?’ Meteroa felt his skin tingle. The dragon-fury was like lightning in the air.
Gaizal shrugged. ‘Bolt.’ Meteroa reached for another and then changed his mind. Another dragon was coming in, straight at them. No time. He pulled down the fire shield and sent the scorpion back along its rail instead. A moment later the whole cave shook. Fire filled the air again. Meteroa closed his eyes and clutched his hands to his head against the sheer noise as the dragon roared. It must have been right at the mouth of the cave when it let loose.
The cave shook again, so hard that it almost knocked the scorpion off its rail. Meteroa staggered, grabbing at 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 yo
u 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 were you going to do that?’ Meteroa waited, watching. The soldier was clearly terrified – he knew that he was very close to death – but there was also an air of resignation about him, as though he’d been in this sort of position enough times before not to be overly bothered.
Meteroa slowly lowered his sword. ‘You are a slave, aren’t you? And they did promise you your freedom.’ He laughed. ‘You can fight for me if you like. You’ll probably die anyway, but I’ll give you a better sword and some armour and some decent food.’ And I could do with every man I can get. Where I get them doesn’t really matter. He laughed. ‘We all eat like kings in here. You can shoot scorpions at the riders who threw you in here. Bet you wouldn’t mind that at all.’
The soldier was clearly weighing up his options. Gaizal threw in another one.
‘Dragon!’
Meteroa backed quickly away from the soldier and stole a glance towards the mouth of the cave. Another war-dragon was heading straight at them with yet another cage. The dragon opened its mouth. Meteroa leapt for the scorpion, dropping his sword, snapping down his visor and diving behind the fire shield as the cave exploded in flames. The dragon roared. Men screamed, wood and stone smashed, and then the dragon was gone again.
When Meteroa lifted his visor, the soldier was gone. Or rather, what was still there was a charred smouldering shape of something vaguely man-like. Behind the fire, the dragon had tossed in another cage filled with slave-soldiers. They were screaming. The cave floor, Meteroa realised, was still scorching hot.
‘Gaizal!’ Meteroa picked up his sword and then quickly dropped it again, clutching his hand. ‘Shit.’ The hilt was blistering. Dragon-scale was too tough and too thick for the inside of a pair of gaunt-lets. ‘Gaizal!’ Slave-soldiers were pulling themselves out of the wreckage now, screaming and wild-eyed with terror. Back outside, in the blinding sky, Meteroa thought he could see more dragons clutching cages. Sheer weight of numbers would push him out of his cave eventually. Is that what they were doing everywhere? Vishmir’s cock – how many of these poor fools did Tichane have?
He turned and ran. The slaves pulling themselves out of the cage shrieked and gave chase. They didn’t even notice Gaizal, still sat in the scorpion. They were faster than him, one of the drawbacks of dragon-scale armour. But there were men-at-arms waiting somewhere at the bottom of the tunnel. Somewhere.
A slave-soldier landed on his back. He spun, flinging him off, but that merely gave the others a chance to catch up with him. They threw themselves at him like a pack of wolves.
‘Gaizal!’ he punched one in the face, smashing the man’s jaw, but
toppled over backwards under the sheer weight of bodies. He could feel them already stabbing at him with their short swords, trying to find a way through his armour. He writhed and thrashed, trying to throw them off. Do you know who I am? Do you know what I did? I killed a dragon today! A fucking dragon!
He roared and managed to free one of his arms to snap the neck of the man clawing at his helmet.
‘I. Will. Not!’
But that was as far as he got before another one of the slaves grabbed hold of his head and bashed it into the stone floor over and over, and everything went black.
8
The Alchemy of Fear
‘I’m doing this for you, cousin,’ Kemir muttered to himself as he strung his bow. His bow or Sollos’s bow? He wasn’t sure any more. They both looked the same. The realisation hurt. He should know something like that. He cocked his head at Snow. ‘I want to know what the Scales told you.’
After you bring me my alchemists, Kemir.
‘After, after. You always have to get what you want first, don’t you?’ He didn’t stop, though. His feet felt springy. If he didn’t know better, he might have thought that Snow had put some kind of spell on him. Somehow he felt lighter. The rider who’d killed his cousin was still alive, could still be made to suffer. An arrow in the leg had been the start of it, but there would be more, so very much more. Yes, it was good to remember why he was here, after all this doubting. Good to have a simple answer again . . .
The alchemists, Kemir.
‘You’d better leave a few of them alive after you’ve done.’ He looked at the hole in the ground that Snow had cleared. There were stairs underneath the dust and the rubble. Yesterday a large stone house had stood here but there was little sign of that now. No, house wasn’t the right word. Something bigger, more like a castle but not.
They are far underground, said Snow in his head. I taste their fear.
‘I don’t suppose you can taste how many of them are down there?’
