The disaster arrived not with war drums, but with the sudden, violent retching of eighty men at the fifth watch.
In Trench Line Two, sixty yards south of the main stone retaining walls, four platoons had gathered around the dawn tea cooking pots. Within twelve minutes of drinking the boiled well water, men began collapsing onto the wooden walkway planks.
Their symptoms followed a rigid toxicological progression: numbness of the lips and tongue, severe bradycardia, violent belly cramping, and rapid breathing failure with a dark, cyanotic discoloration of the wet inner skin.
When Pei Jing arrived in the trench, six soldiers were already in full clonic convulsions. Their jaws were locked so tightly that blood trickled from their cracked teeth.
General Yue Ding was already kneeling in the mud beside a dying junior corporal, his iron gauntlet tearing away the boy’s scarf. The general’s scar across his nose was flushed dark crimson with rage.
“Water poison,” Yue Ding growled, looking up as Pei Jing approached. “The Red Gorge aqueduct feeds the lower water tanks. The shamans must have bypassed the northern pickets during the midnight fog.”
Pei Jing didn’t waste time in commiseration. He knelt beside the iron tea cooking pot, scooped a fine china bowl of the clear, steaming liquid. Then he brought it to his nose.
