Belisarius Series/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

In Dance of Time, when Lady Damodara's palace is being evacuated into the escape tunnel one of the laundry maids is killed in cold blood by Valentinian when she, being mentally deficient, panics at the last minute and refuses to come with everyone else and can't be left alive to tell the Malwa by what route they will be escaping. It's presented as a very cold-blooded act by the resident Combat Pragmatist, the murder of a defenseless young woman too stupid to even know what she was doing. But in the previous novel, Tide of Victory, there is a brief sequence of Narses cleaning out the agents that the Malwa intelligence service had infiltrated into Lady Damodara's palace servants. Narses arranged for some to be fired for alleged theft, others to be quietly killed, and two of the maids to be restricted to the laundry where they couldn't hope to see anything going on. Although neither he nor anyone else ever actually figures it out in the story, its very likely that the servant Valentinian killed was not developmentally disabled or panicking -- she was a Malwa spy in deep cover and she was attempting to stay behind to report in. Valentinian made the entirely right decision, if for partly the wrong reason.

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