My least favorite mage moved me slightly to the left with one hand and blew some powder out of his other toward the drant’s ugly face. As soon as it reached the beast Padral muttered something and the powder caught fire, as did the drant’s head. It started screaming and I kicked it back into the wall before stabbing it a lot of times in the belly and chest. Then, being careful not to touch the still burning head, I heaved it over the wall, hoping he would knock some of his friends off the wall as he fell. I quickly helped my father up and then looked down the wall to see how things were going.

Not too badly, I thought with some satisfaction. We actually had a chance to survive. I smiled. I kept smiling until I looked away from the wall and saw that there was smoke in several parts of Tarn. That meant drants had gotten over the walls somewhere else.

“Venzik! The town’s on fire!” I yelled before another drant made it over the wall and I had to kill it. By the time I was finished Venzik had finished off his own drant and had seen it for himself. “You’re the military expert, what do we do? Abandon the walls or keep fighting here?”

“We stay for now. I believe the bulk of their forces are concentrated here to try to get the gate open. We will just have to trust that the drants inside the wall are being dealt with. Delik Slin and Kralnik never came back from rounding up the tavern folk. Maybe they are handling it.”

More drants were coming over the wall so I got back to work, this time throwing a dagger into the neck of one drant and freeing me up to fight his friend. Venzik had his own set of drants to deal with so our conversation was over. I used my free time to kill the two drants I had quickly named Knife Neck and Other One. It wasn’t exactly fun, but it was certainly satisfying. I even had time to get my knife back. I didn’t have time to clean it, but I figured I’d be using it again before too long. I was right.

I kept fighting, and killing, drants, even though I was tired and would have preferred to be doing almost anything else. Except dying. That was a great motivator. Eventually, I killed one and there were no more in front of me for a moment, so I focused on breathing and yelled for water. Before anybody brought me some more drants showed up and things got hairy for a few moments. I was trying to decapitate a drant again, before he got completely over the wall and my sword got stuck in his neck. He took it with him when he fell. That sucked. His buddy seemed happy about it. I was pretty sure he was grinning as he pulled himself farther up. He probably stopped grinning when I shoved one of my knives into his eye and tickled his brain a bit. I lost my knife when he fell. Damn! How tired was I.

I had a second or two so I yelled for a sword and water. The water boy must have been waiting because he thrust a skin into my hands before I was even done yelling. “I don’t suppose you have a sword for me, too?” I asked him before drinking as much as I could.

“No, sir. But I will get you one.” I bet he would have, too, because he seemed very dependable before the drant my father was fighting accidentally killed him when my father deflected his sword. I’d never seen my father so angry. He shoved his sword right into the drant’s neck, then jerked it around, making an awful mess. I left him to it and took the sword one of the dead town guards had been using. It was a serviceable weapon, but I missed the feel of my own blade. I wasn’t planning on digging through a pile of drant corpses to find it though. Especially not now, with all those live drants still coming up the wall. I returned to business and discovered that my new sword killed drants just fine.

I noticed that at least half of the people I could see fighting on my part of the wall weren’t Tarn guardsmen or my companions. I hadn’t noticed them show up, but I guess Delik Slin, Kralnik and Stern had done their job getting the people from the taverns and inns into the fight. I looked back at the town and didn’t notice any more fires, so I figured things there were under control. That was when the gates burst open.