Jorg, panting, hurried back towards him. "Sir?"
"Tell Heidlor to range in on the keep's door and to keep a watch out behind us, ranged in on the road past the gatehouse."
"The gatehouse, sir? But we came that way-"
"Exactly." Otto bared his teeth at the man; Jorg ducked his head hastily and ran back towards the gunners and their overloaded mules.
Otto settled down, kneeling, to watch the lines of advance. The lack of fire from the castle worried him, but he had scarcely raised his glasses again when a loud and hearty hail demanded his attention. "Ahem, my lord Neuhalle!" The interruption leaned over the pommel of his horse to look down at Otto. It was Geraunt, Earl Marlburg, one of the king's younger and more enthusiastic vassals.
"Yes, Sir Geraunt?" Otto stared up at him, annoyed.
"His majesty sends word!" Geraunt was obviously excited. He drew a message tube out of his sleeve and extended it towards Otto. "A change to your disposition. You are to turn around and withdraw to the gatehouse, there to cover the approaches to the castle, he says."
"Right." Otto took the tube. A wave of palpable relief washed through him. Not that he was a coward-certainly the past month of campaigning had given the lie to that-but the idea of advancing into a booby-trapped castle did not fill him with joy. If the king wanted him to stake out the approaches to the castle, against the stab in the back with a witch's knife that Otto himself half-expected, then that was a reassuringly known quantity. More importantly it suggested that his majesty was, if not exactly sane, then no crazier than any other fox. "Can you tell me what his majesty intends?"
Sir Geraunt hunkered down, putting his horse between Otto and the keep. Otto looked up at him: "His majesty is most exercised; he says the witches have fled before him, and probably laid mines to bring down the keep, so he intends to secure the inner walls, then bring in sappers to find the-"
The world flashed white, twice, in a tenth of the beat of a heart. Everything was white as the face of the noonday sun, except for the knife-edge shadow of Sir Geraunt, freakishly cast across Otto's upper body and head.
Otto blinked as a wave of heat washed across his skin. A giant the size of a mountain had opened the door of a kiln full of molten iron big enough to forge the hammer of the gods, and the glare surged overhead, stifling and oppressive. The sensation of heat faded over the duration of two heartbeats and he opened his eyes, but everything was blotchy and purple-white with afterimages. Was that an explosion? he thought numbly, as reflex or shock made him collapse back into the ground cover. What was left of Sir Geraunt's mount, with what was left of Sir Geraunt still astride it, began to fall sideways into his depression. Neither of them lived, which was perhaps a mercy, because while Sir Geraunt and his horse were intact and unblemished on the side that fell towards Otto, their opposite side-that had faced the castle-was scorched to charcoal around a delicate intaglio of bone.
The castle was no longer there. Where the keep had crouched within its courtyard, shielded by the outer walls and their rammed-earth revetments, a skull-shape of dust and fire was rising, its cap looming over the ramparts like a curious salamander crawling from its volcanic home to survey its surroundings.
As Otto fell, a blast of fiery wind pulsed across the burning grass that covered the approaches to the castle, casting aloft the calcined bodies of the men and animals who had been caught in the open at the moment of the heat flash. Burning sticks and a shotgun blast of fractured gravel caromed off the ground. A scant second later the shock front reversed, sucking back towards the roiling bubble of flames as it rose from the center of the fortification on a stem of dirt and debris.
Otto inhaled a mouth-watering stench of cooking meat and hot air and tried to collect his scattered wits. Something was holding his legs down. He couldn't see anything-just violet afterimages stubbornly refusing to fade when he screwed his eyes shut. Panicking, he tried to kick, but without vision he couldn't see the dead horse lying atop him. His back was a dull mass of pain where he'd fallen, and the smell-have they taken me down to Hel, the choosers of the slain? he wondered dizzily as he turned his damaged eyes towards the furious underside of the mushroom cloud.
Carl stared at the turbulent caul of smoke rising above the ridge-line and swallowed, forcing back the sharp taste of stomach acid at the back of his tongue. His head pounded, but his eyes were clear. Around him, soldiers stared slack-jawed at the ominous thunderhead. The predawn sky was just turning dark blue, but the fires ignited by the bomb brought their own light to the scene, so for the moment their faces were stained ruddy with a mixture of awe and fear.
"Is that what I think it is?" asked Helmut.
Baron Hjorth cleared his throat. "It can't be," he said confidently. "They're all supposed to be under lock… and key…" He trailed off into an uncertain silence.
Carl took him by the elbow. More soldiers were spilling in out of the air, staggering or bending over in some cases-two world-walks in three hours was a brutal pace, even for the young and fit-and Carl had to step around them as he steered Oliver a hundred meters up the road in the direction of the castle. "That." He gestured. "Is. A mushroom cloud. Yes?"
Oliver blinked rapidly. "I think so." He swallowed. "I've never seen one before."
"Well. Where the fuck did it come from?"
"Don't ask me!" Oliver snarled. "1 didn't do it! God-ona-stick, what do you take me for? All our bombs are accounted for as of last Tuesday except for the one Matthias"-he stopped dead for a moment-"Oh dear."
"If that bastard Matthias-"
Oliver cut him off with a slashing gesture. "Trust me, Matthias is dead." He closed his eyes, composing himself. "This is someone else. Sending us a message." He opened his eyes. "How old is that… thing?"
Carl glanced up, uneasily sniffing the air: The tang of wood smoke spoke of pine trees on the reverse slope ignited by the heat flash. "I don't know. Not old-see the stem? It hasn't drifted." His guts loosened as he realized, if I'd timed this just a little later we'd still have been there. He licked his thumb and held it up. There was a faint breeze from the south, blowing towards the castle. "Um. What, if anything, do you know about fallout?"
"The poison rain these things shed? I think we should forget the Pervert and get your men out of here. Forced march. If you want to set up guns south of Wergatsfurt and catch any stragglers you're welcome to them, but if they were camped a mile yonder"-he gestured towards the cloud-"I don't know. They might have survived, if they dug in for the night. Although I don't give much for their chances if that fire starts to spread."
Carl grinned humorlessly. "Have you ever known the Pervert to refuse a chance to stab us in the back, my lord? Dawn attacks a speciality, remember?"
Oliver shook his head.
"Come." Carl turned his back on the cloud. "I'll leave two men to scout the area in an hour's time. The rest-let's hit the road. I'll have time to worry about whoever's sending us messages when I've hunted down and killed the last of the pretender's men."
Behind them a dark rain began to fall on the battlefield, fat drops
turbid with radioactive dust scorched from the stones of the castle and the bones of the men who had followed their usurper-king into the radius of the fireball. The survivors, burned and broken-those that could move-cupped their hands to catch the rain and drank greedily.
Otto Neuhalle, and the ten survivors of his company, were among them. They did not know-nor could they-that the man-portable nuclear weapon responsible for the fireball had a maximum yield of only one kiloton, and that such bombs are inherently dirty, and that this blast had been, by nuclear standards, absolutely filthy; that it had failed to consume even a tenth of its plutonium core, and had scooped up huge masses of debris and irradiated it before scattering it tightly around ground zero.