%% Status:: Published in [[Worldbuilding Magazine]]. Characters:: nin-[[Padima]] [[Jari]] Setting:: [[Marna]] before the [[Unification War]] Newsletter-Ref:: [[2020-08-17 Beetles]] ## Notes - Takes place during the [[Siege of Marna]], roughly 5 years before the events of [[Civil Mage|Civil Mage]]. Moral of the story should be the importance of inspecting food? Importance of food service people for handling a crisis? Can the assistant be all like "I wish I were out there on the wall fighting" or whatever? Or "there isn't enough time to do all the boring required stuff, we have to much work, let's cut corners." %% # BEETLE SIEGE A small, blue-winged beetle wiggled its way to the top of the barley-bin. Keldehssi mages had held Marna under siege so long, Padima had lost her squeamishness about grinding insects into the morning bread. She almost ignored the way the creature skittered when Jari tossed it onto her millstone. "Get me a ladle!” she snapped at the initiate, lunging toward the stone as she recognized the danger. The grain stores were already contaminated, but she could save the rest of the food stores if she caught the beetle in time. The boy looked confused, which was often the drawback of working with initiates, but all the other priests had fled—or died. “But nin-Padima, you said we can’t afford to waste the protein.” Just once, she wished Jari would do as he was told without needing an explanation. Or that he’d managed to memorize the Gardener’s scriptures like every other halfway-competent initiate. “We can’t have half the garrison soldiers dripping incubated Rowe beetle venom onto the city walls, either.” Padima all but ripped the long-handled silver ladle from Jari’s shocked grasp. She swept the millstone with the ladle spoon, but the beetle was too fast and skittered onto the floor—toward the exposed toes of Jari’s sandals. “No!” Padima shouted, but Jari flinched back and stomped reflexively. Noxious ichor squirted out of the creature’s chitinous exoskeleton, etching a hole in the ceramic tile floor of the Temple sanctum. Jari screamed as the ichor ate through the sole of his sandal and blistered the bottom of his foot. Padima ignored the mageborn toxins eating their way toward the bean stores and helped her initiate to a chair. He whimpered. “Don’t look.” Padima removed the heavy damask of her outer robes and wrapped the linen around her hands. Only then did she remove the boy’s oxhide sandals and reach for one of the carefully-rationed lemons hanging from a basket overhead. She used a speck of hoarded power to rehydrate the fruit, then squeezed citrus juice onto Jari’s scarlet slab of separated skin. The blisters didn’t get any better–but they stopped getting worse. Padima handed Jari the mangled lemon slice. “Hold this against your foot.” He obeyed, and she ignored the contaminated grain scattered across the floor in her rush to inspect the grain box. “What are we going to do, nin-Padima?” Jari whispered, staring in horror as she pulled beetle after beetle from the stores. “The city will starve if we can’t use that grain.” “We’re going to make lemon-barley pilaf,” Padima said grimly, but there was no other choice. Lemons were the only way she knew to neutralize the toxins, and they couldn’t afford to lose so much barley. “And hope the siege breaks soon.”