The blast of the air-powered discharge didn’t boom like black powder. It barked with the dry, splitting crack of an overstressed oak beam snapping under sixty tons of dead load.
A ring of cold vapor whipped from the mortar muzzle, stripping the autumn frost from the flatcar timbers. Two miles down the defile, the eighty-two-pound steel canister reached the crest of its arc, hung motionless against the leaden sky for the space of a heartbeat. Then he plummeted into the center of the unballasted dirt road at Milepost Two.
The clockwork fuze tripped at twenty-one point two seconds.
It didn’t produce fire. The burst was entirely air-powered and clockwork. A high-pressure rupture of backup air flasks that atomized forty pounds of dry wet lime plaster into a blinding chalk-white geyser. It was followed by the whip-crack dispersal of four hundred lead scatter-shot pellets. The pellets ripped into the scrub oak and thrashed the gravel into spray.
A wall of solid white dust rolled over the roadway.
Through the optics of his survey transit, Giles Croft watched the immediate result on the royal vanguard. The three thousand heavy cataphracts didn’t break into glorious formation.
The war-horses in the front ranks, blinded by the sudden wall of bitter-salt powder and scared by the whistling pellets overhead, reared and backed wildly into the files behind them. Black-enameled plate collided with embossed steel shields. Two heraldic standard-bearers tumbled from their saddles into the wet ditch.
