Free The Order of the Scales by Stephen Deas Page A

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