First and Only by Dan Abnett Read Free Book Online Page B

tunic cloth. Corbec felt lesions forming on his thighs and shins.
    He turned back to Sergeant Curral at the head of the column across the crater.
    ‘Move the men up and round!’ he cried. ‘And bring the medic over in the first party.’ Afraid by the exposure of moving around the lip of the crater against the sky, the men traversed quickly and timidly. Corbec had Curral regroup them on the far side in fire-team lines along each side of the trench. The medic came to him and the sweepers, and sprayed their legs with antiseptic mist from a flask. The pain eased and the fabric was damped so that it no longer smouldered.
    Corbec was picking up his gun when Sergeant Grell called to him. He moved forward down the lines of waiting men and saw what Grell had found.
    It was Colmar, one of the scouts he had sent forward. He was dead, hanging pendulously from the trench wall on a great, rusty iron spike which impaled his chest. It was the sort of spike that the workers of the forge world would have used to wedge and manipulate the hoppers of molten ore in the Adeptus Mechanicus furnace works. His hands and feet were missing.
    Corbec gazed at him for a minute and then looked away. Though they had met no serious resistance, it was sickeningly clear that they weren’t alone in these trenches. Whatever the number of the Shriven still here, be it stragglers left behind or guerrilla units deliberately set to thwart them, a malicious presence was shadowing them in the gullies and channels of the support trenches.
    Corbec took hold of the spike and pulled Colmar down. He took out the ground sheet from his own bedroll and rolled the pitiful corpse in it so that no one would see. He could not bring himself to incinerate the soldier, as he had done with the shrines.
    ‘Move on,’ he instructed and Grell led the men forward behind the sweepers.
    Corbec suddenly stopped dead as if an insect had stung him. There was a rasping in his ear. He realised it was his microbead link. He registered an overwhelming sense of relief that the radio link should be live at all even as he realised it was a short range broadcast from Mkoll, sergeant of the scouting unit.
    ‘Can you hear it, sir?’ came Mkoll’s voice.
    ‘Feth! Hear what?’ Corbec asked. All he could hear was the ceaseless thunder of the enemy guns and the shaking tremors of the falling shells.
    ‘Drums,’ Scout-Sergeant Mkoll said, ‘I can hear drums.’
    Nine
    B RIN M ILO HEARD the drums before Gaunt did. Gaunt valued his musician’s almost preternaturally sharp senses, but they sometimes disturbed him nonetheless. The insight reminded him of someone. The girl perhaps, years ago. The one with the sight. The one who had haunted his dreams for so many years afterwards.
    ‘Drums!’ the boy hissed – and a moment later Gaunt caught the sound too.
    They were moving through the silos and shelled-out structures of the rising industrial manufactories just behind the Shriven lines, sooty shells of melted stone, rusted metal girderwork and fractured ceramite. Gargoyles, built to ward the buildings against contamination, had been defaced or toppled completely. Gaunt was exceptionally cautious. The action of the day had played out unexpectedly. They had advanced far further than he had anticipated from the starting point of a simple repulse of an enemy attack, thanks both to good fortune and Dravere’s harsh directive. Reaching the front of the enemy lines they had found them generally abandoned after the initial fighting, as if the majority of the Shriven had withdrawn in haste. Though a curtain of enemy bombardment cut off their lines of retreat, Gaunt felt that the Shriven had made a great mistake and pulled back too far in their urgency to avoid both the Guard attack and their own answering artillery. Either that or they were planning something.
    Gaunt didn’t like that notion much. He had two hundred and thirty men with him in a long spearhead column, but he knew that if the Shriven