I yelled for Venzik but of course he heard it happen just like everybody else. Almost everybody else. I’ll admit that a few people were concentrating so much on fighting for their lives that they didn’t hear it. And some other people were probably busy being killed or eaten by drants. But the vast majority of us heard it and even felt it. The stupid drants didn’t even use a battering ram. They just kept pushing at it and the cheap gates that Tarn built just gave in under the pressure of what looked to be about a hundred drants. “Padral!” I yelled. Do something!” I was already heading for the stairs, not the ones that take you right by the gate, there were already too many drants there. I was moving toward the next set, about seventy-five feet away from the gate. I grabbed Padral and dragged him behind me. “Come on!”

“What about me doing something?” he asked.

I understood his confusion. I had changed my mind. “I decided you should do whatever it is you’re going to do when we’re prepared to capitalize on it. Right now we have to get off the wall or we’ll be trapped here.”

At least the drants had stopped climbing over one another to get in over the wall now that they could just walk in. If we’d had to fight our way off the wall, I don’t think we would have survived. We would have been trapped between multiple groups of drants. An awful place to be. I waited at the bottom of the stairs for the rest of our group to descend and stopped as many other defenders as I could by telling them we were going to magically counterattack at the gate. I got about half of them to form up. Once everyone was off the wall, which seemed to take hours but was really just a couple of minutes, I turned to Padral, Stegen and Loberth, who were standing together off to the side. “I don’t know what you’ve got left to give but now’s the time to do it. If we let all of those drants at the gate get into the town we’re all dead.” I looked them each in the eye. “Every single person within these walls will die. Can you do anything to help even the odds?”

Padral nodded. “I will need your help, Stegen. You, as well, Loberth, and it will be incredibly dangerous… to all of us.” He looked hard at the young elvish apprentice mage, who was still decades older than either of us, then at Stegen.

“A joining?” Stegen asked. I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but from the looks on all three of their faces it was pretty bad.

Padral closed his eyes for a moment before nodding. “Exactly so. Will you do it?” The other two mages nodded solemnly.

“Whatever you’re going to do it has to be now.” I said forcefully. “Those drants will break out into the entire town any minute.”

“It cannot be now.” I glared at him so hard that my jaw ached but he just smiled slightly. “But it can be soon.”

I sighed. “Soon will have to do. How close do we need to be?”

Padral smiled fully and it was a wicked one. “As close as possible, of course.”

“You heard the man!” I shouted. “Let’s go get those spawn of Drantor!” There weren’t any cheers, but I saw a lot of battle faces being put on which was good enough. Venzik ordered Celerith to stay back and guard the mages. I turned to lead the way to the broken gates and Sir Aryoss, Venzik, Vone and my father all joined me. Each of them had various wounds, and I noticed that I did, too. None of mine, or theirs, appeared to be immediately life threatening, which was fine because the drants at the gate already had that part of things taken care of.

Nobody said anything as we made our way along the wall. I thought about asking about casualties to our group that had left Ansdron just the day before, but I decided not to. No need to get everybody thinking about lost friends right before we were going to jump right in to losing more. I held up a hand to stop everyone when we reached the point where we were as close as we could be without the drants seeing us. The corner of the last building before the gates blocked us from sight but we could hear fighting. It was probably the defenders who had been on the wall on the other side of the gates, including Thilos, Imprid and some of our other friends. I motioned to the mages. “This is it. What do you need from us?”