The backup courtyard behind Trench Line Four was roofed with split spruce logs and padded with three layers of frost-hardened clay. Inside, the heat stood at twelve degrees above freezing, sustained by eight massive cast-iron cooking pots resting upon brick draft hearths.
This was Pei Jing’s centralized extraction kitchen.
Before his appointment as Chief Trench Marshal, the various platoons had cooked independently in shallow trench hollows. It used unshielded campfires that lost seventy-five percent of their heat output to the updraft. Grease had dripped into the dirt. Marrow bones had been gnawed raw and tossed into the latrine trenches. Soldiers had suffered chronic dysentery from half-cooked horse meat and melted surface snow laden with soot.
Pei Jing had cleared that chaos within thirty-six hours.
Standing upon a raised pine platform beside the main chimney pipe, Pei Jing inspected the eight cooking pots. Each vat held three hundred gallons of boiling spring water hauled from the deep artesian well beneath the central keep. In the bubbling broth floated thousands of cracked leg bones, ribs, and skulls salvaged from the three slain Two-Tailed Blood Bears and sixty pack mules that had succumbed to frostbite along the southern supply route.
“Boiling time for the third batch?” Pei Jing asked, his voice cutting through the hiss of escaping steam.
