Philip Stanley wrote:I don't know if this has been brought up before, but I think I've found a serious goof-up by Merlin in LaMA!
On pp. 328-340, acting in the persona of Dialydd Mab, Merlin attacks the barge carrying Vyktyr Tahrlsahn and Hahskyll Seagairs back to Zion, firing many shots and killing everyone aboard with his M96 Mahndrayn rifle and his two revolvers, both cartridge-firing weapons. In connection with this, he has occasion to reload all three weapons.
My question is this: did he police up his brass? There is no textev suggesting he did. Did he just leave the rifle magazine and all the loose brass cartridges lying around when he left?
Finding that magazine and those cartridges at the attack site would give the Temple armorers an enormous insight into the next generation of Charisian weapons, allowing them to duplicate them!
Why didn't he police his brass?
Philip Stanley
For the sake of brevity, I expect RFC purposefully omitted from the narrative such mundane tasks as policing the brass of both the rifle and the revolvers that Mab used. We aren't told where his horse came from, or what he did with it afterwards either. (Although we can infer that he flew the air lorry with the horse inside from wherever he has it parked near Siddar city, because he uses the lorry to pick up his horse and the pack mules carrying crates of wyverns from Ahlverez's camp later on in his persona as Master Slaytyr.) I always wondered how he hid his horses tracks so that they didn't come to an abrupt end when he reached the lorry... Again, not crucial to the story so RFC didn't explain it.
If he did forget to pick up all those scattered bullets, one of OWL's remotes could have done it for him later as others have pointed out.
Note that in the delicious scene where Clyntahn is informed of the execution of the inquisitors who most "distinguished" themselves at Sarkyn, after a few pages of Clyntahn breaking everything in sight and doing his best to give himself a hernia, Rayno explains the details of the attack. Note that the presence of brass cartridges are conspicuous by their
absence in Rayno's report. So it's reasonable to conclude that Mab did indeed police his brass - but he left Tahrlsahn's body pinned to the cabin wall by a Charisian midshipman's dirk as a blatant message to inquisitors everywhere, and to show that justice had been done for the murder of the Charisian POWs in AMF.
SPOILER!!!!! AND I'M NOT KIDDING!Note that early in HFQ some 5000 M96 rifles were captured by a Desnairan privateer. We weren't told if the same ship carried ammunition for the M96s as well, but if it did, then Desnair can certainly send samples of the new rifle, its magazines, and its bullets to the Temple. So the CoGA may have examples of this bit of cutting edge Charisian tech already.
However, in my opinion the M96 and brass bullet cartridges are the first bit of technology that the CoGA simply
cannot duplicate in sufficient quantity to make the espionage worthwhile. The barrel of the M96 is specially hardened steel with extra deep rifling, and the church simply can't make that quality of steel. (Or it couldn't until the Charisian engineer was murdered and his briefcase was stolen in LaMA.) The bullets require several major technological steps that the Church simply cannot duplicate - certainly not in any useful numbers.
So the CoGA's generals will know the sort of rifle that's killing off their soldiers, but they won't receive similar weapons and ammo before the war is over.
END OF SPOILERSo clearly it doesn't matter all that much whether Mab policed his brass or not, although it's reasonable to assume that he did, not only when he executed the inquisitors and soldiers involved in the torture and murder of the citizen of Sarkyn, but when he later shot the military commander in charge of those murders, his second in command, and third in command, etc. Juicy reading and I laughed all the way through that chapter, but I think Merlin was smart enough to clean up after himself - after all, the purpose of killing everyone involved in the Sarkyn atrocities was to punish the guilty while leaving an air of mystery regarding how it was done.
So yeah, this is an item that you could have easily put in the nitpicking thread, and I'd have backed you all the way. But an author can't include every detail in a novel or it would bloat to unreadable size, as well as concentrating so greatly on picayune details as to lose its entertainment value. The reader may be left wondering now and then, but after being outwitted on countless occasions by RFC's unexpected plot twists, I trust that he knows what he's doing. So blame any mistakes on his dictation software or his editor!
