* * *
The track from Kirschford down to the Linden Valley was clear of tinker-lord traffic this afternoon. The flow of refugees had slackened to a trickle, for those who wanted to evacuate had for the most part already left. Helena voh Wu and her infants and sister-in-law had come this way a week before; while Gyorg was still occupied with the corvée, shuttling supplies between anonymous storage lockups in Boston and wine cellars in the Gruinmarkt, his dependents had achieved the tenuous sanctuary of a refugee camp in New Britain.
So none of them paused to look up, slack-jawed, as the first wave of bombers commenced their laydown.
A B83 hydrogen bomb isn’t very large; it weighs about a ton, and looks exactly like most other air-dropped bombs. The weapons the Fifth Bomb Wing were delivering were equipped with parachutes which retarded their descent from altitude, so that it would take each bomb more than three minutes to descend to its detonation altitude of twenty thousand feet. Flying parallel courses spaced twelve miles apart, wingtip-to-wingtip, the aircraft began to drop their payload at one-minute intervals, seeding a furrow of hells twelve miles apart. The distance between bombs was important; any closer, and the heat flash might ignite the Kevlar ribbon chutes of the other weapons.
Three minutes and twenty seconds. The trails arrowed south across the sky of the Gruinmarkt, a faint rumble of distant thunder disturbing the afternoon quiet; and then the sky lit up as the first row of eighteen hydrogen bombs, spanning the kingdom from sea to inland frontier, detonated at an altitude of just under four miles.
The flash of a single one-megaton hydrogen bomb, followed by a fireball which dims over a period of nearly a minute, is visible in good weather at a range of hundreds of miles—light from the flash is scattered by particles in the upper atmosphere, reflected around the curve of the earth. To an observer in Niejwein, the capital city located nearly two hundred miles south of the first row, the northern horizon would have begun to flicker and brighten as if a gigantic match had been held to the edge of the map. There was no sound; would be no sound for many minutes, for even though the shock waves from the detonations overtook the bombers, it would take a long time for the attenuated noise to reach the capital.
To an observer located closer to the bombing line, it would have been the end of the world.
The heat flash from a B83 detonating at twenty thousand feet is sufficient, in good weather, to ignite cardboard or cotton sheeting, heat damp pine needles to smoldering tinder, and char wood and flesh six miles from ground zero. The leading row of eighteen bombers were spaced close enough that over open ground no spot could remain unseared; only in the lee slope of a steep valley or the depths of a cellar or cave was there any hope of survival.
Peasants working in the fields might have glanced up as the sky flashed white above them; it would have been the last thing they saw through rapidly clouding eyes. Their skin reddened and crisped as the grain stubble and trees around them began to smoke; screaming and stumbling for cover, they blundered towards their houses or the tree line, limned in the flaring red burn of a billion leaves igniting simultaneously. There were some survivors of the initial flash: women spinning thread or weaving cloth, millers tending their wheels, even a lucky few sitting behind dry-stone walls or swimming in cool water pools. But as they looked up in confusion they saw the same thing in every direction around them: trees, plants, buildings, even cattle and people smoking and flaming.
And then the hammerblast of wind arrived from above, slamming into hedges and walls alike and splintering all before them.
The aircrew saw nothing of this. They flew on instruments, insulated blackout screens drawn across the cockpit windows to prevent reflected light from blinding their pilots. Perhaps they glanced at one another as shock waves buffeted the tail surfaces of the bombers, bumping and dropping them before the pilots regained full control authority; but if they did so, it was with no sympathy for the unseen carnage below. A president had been killed, more thousands murdered by emissaries from this world; their word for the task they were engaged in was payback.
Seventy seconds later, the second row of H-bombs reached their preset altitude and began to detonate, flashbulbs popping erratically on a wire two hundred and fifty miles wide. And seventy seconds after that, the process continued, weeping tears of incandescence across the burning coastline.
There were a lot of flashes.
* * *
It took the aircraft nearly twelve minutes to reach Niejwein, two-thirds of the way through their carpet-bombing run. And here, there were witnesses. Niejwein, with a population of nearly sixty thousand souls, was the biggest city within four hundred miles; proud palaces and high-roofed temples rose above a sprawling urban metropolis, home to dozens of trades and no fewer than four markets. And the people of Niejwein had due notice. The flickering brightness on the horizon had been growing for almost a quarter hour; and lately there had been a rumbling in the ground, an uneasy shuddering as if Lightning Child himself was shifting, uneasy in his bed of clay. A strange hot wind had set the bells of the temple of Sky Father clanging, bringing the priests stumbling from their sanctuary to squint at the northern lights in disbelief and shock.
And in the Thorold Palace, some of the residents realized what was happening.
At midafternoon, the dowager duchess Patricia was holding court, sitting in formal session in the east wing of the palace to hear petitions on behalf of her daughter. A merchant, Freeman Riss of Somewhere-Bridge, was bringing a complaint about the lord of his nearest market town, who, either in a fit of pique or for some reason Freeman Riss was reticent about disclosing, had banned said merchant from selling his wares in the weekly market.
At another time, this complaint might well have interested Dame Patricia—also known for the majority of her life as Iris Beckstein—as much for its value as leverage against the earl in question as for its merit as a case. But it was a hot afternoon, and sitting in the stiff robes of state beneath a row of stained-glass windows which dammed the air and cast flickering multicolored shadows across the bench before her, she was prone to distraction.
Riss was reciting, in a scratchy voice as if from memory, “And I deponeth thus, that on the third feastday of Sister Corn, the laird did send his armsmen to stand before my drover and his oxen and say—”
Patricia raised a shaky hand. “Stop,” she said. Freeman Riss paused, his mouth open. “Surcease, we pray you.” She squinted up at the windows. They were flickering. “We declare a recess. Your indulgence is requested, for we are feeling unwell.” She closed her eyes briefly. I hope it isn’t another attack, she worried; the MS hadn’t affected her vision so far, but her legs had been largely numb all week, and the prickling in her hands was worsening. “Sergeant-at-arms—”
There was a banging and clattering from outside the room. The courtiers and plaintiffs began to talk, just as the door burst open. It was Helmut ven Rindt, lord-lieutenant and commander of the second troop of the Clan’s security force, accompanied by six soldiers. Their camouflage surcoats sat uneasy above machine-woven titanium mail. “Your grace? I regret the need to interrupt you, but you are urgently required elsewhere.”
“Really?” Iris stared at Helmut. Not you, too? The clenching in her gut was bad.