Free The Dragons of Decay by J.J. Thompson Page A

of the snow-covered road and, as they struggled along, two
shapes scurried by them, heading in the opposite direction. He
couldn't even tell if they were men or women.
    The main gate suddenly loomed out of
the storm and the wizard saw someone crouched there digging into a
large trunk and pulling out handfuls of arrows. The person stood up
with a load of ammunition and slipped and slid to the right of the
gate where someone else had climbed down a ladder to take the bundle
and pass it up to another person standing on the parapet that ran
along the inside of the wall.
    “ Terry!” Clara called out
and the man at the bottom of the ladder turned and waved. He moved
toward them and they met him at the gate.
    “ How's it going?” the
cleric asked, raising her voice over the howling of the wind.
    “ Well, we're holding them for
now,” Terry shouted. He was a young, blond-headed man with a
heavy beard that was coated with ice. He was panting and his breath
puffed out in white clouds.
    “ But the ammo is getting
scarce, Clara,” he continued. “Another wave of those
bastards and we'll be fighting them hand to hand.”
    “ Damn it,” Simon
muttered.
    He looked at Aeris, who was hovering
in the air just behind him.
    “ Can you scout out the
situation, safely?” he asked. “I need to know how many
wights we're dealing with.”
    Aeris snorted, the little puff of air
blowing him back a few inches.
    “ Of course I can. Give me a
couple of minutes.”
    He disappeared and Simon looked at
Clara and the guardsman.
    “ Aeris will give us an accurate
idea of the number of our enemies,” he told them. He looked at
Terry. “Where are Malcolm and Aiden?
    The man pointed at the wall to the
left of the gate.
    “ Up there. Thank God their aim
is phenomenal. We'd have been overrun by now but for them.”
    “ Good. I'm heading up. Kronk,”
he said and looked down at the earthen who was standing next to his
right leg. “Could you check on Virginia and the others at the
back gate? See how they're holding up?”
    “ My pleasure, master,”
the little guy said. He vanished into the ground, leaving a small
mound of dirt on top of the snow.
    “ Handy friends you have there,
sir wizard,” Terry told him with a tired grin.
    “ They are that. Clara, I'll see
you in a bit.”
    She nodded and gripped his arm
tightly for a brief moment.
    Simon hurried across the road to the
left side of the gate, the snow crunching under his boots. He slipped
his staff across his back and began to climb up the ladder carefully;
the rungs were coated with ice.
    Up on the parapet, the wind smacked
into him full force and he squinted as he looked along the wall.
    A few feet away he saw Aiden, longbow
in hand, lean over the wall, aim carefully and shoot at an unseen
target.
    “ That's got it,” the
wizard heard someone yell with a laugh and then saw the massive
figure of Malcolm just beyond Aiden, nodding in approval.
    The big man spotted Simon and smiled
broadly. His dark face and long braids were barely recognizable in
the dense storm.
    “ Wizard!” he called
gleefully. “Nice of you to join us.”
    Aiden spun around and smiled down at
Simon
    “ Good day, sir wizard. Come to
join the hunt?”
    “ Hunt?” Malcolm said
scornfully. “Shooting fish in a barrel is more like it. No
sport at all in this.”
    Simon was pleased that the men's
spirits were high but he wondered if they were taking the situation a
little too lightly.
    He peered at Aiden through the snow
and saw a pinched look underneath the bravado. The man wasn't as calm
as he wanted others to think, obviously.
    “ Yeah, good to see you both.
Aeris is out there,” he pointed beyond the wall, “checking
out the situation. He'll report back in a bit.”
    Simon leaned over the wall and stared
down at the moat below.
    The deep ditch was hard to make out
through the blizzard, but he could see vague shapes moving along the
bottom. The moat was a dozen feet deep at least and the drawbridge
was