Sun Liang

Put on the throne by Zhuge Ke as a child and spends the chapter being managed - until the end, when he supplies the warrant for the assassination himself: 'I am afraid of him, too. I have wanted to remove him for some time, but have found no opportunity. If you would prove your loyalty, you would do it for me.' Agrees to Teng Yin's banquet plan, leaves the hall on an excuse at the right moment, and is the authority Sun Jun invokes on the stairs.

Named once, and the sentence is his whole situation: 'The Ruler of Wu, Sun Liang, although intelligent, was helpless in his hands.' Sun Chen kills three senior ministers and commits seventy thousand troops to a foreign rebellion without reference to him.

Given mouse droppings in his honey at the West Park, he questions the storekeeper, learns a eunuch had been refused honey a few days before, and convicts him by physics: 'If the dirt has been lying in the honey for some time it will be wet all through' — the lumps are cut open, they are dry inside, and the eunuch confesses. Clever enough for that and powerless against a Prime Minister whose four brothers hold every command. His plot leaks through Quan Ji to Quan Shang to Quan Shang's wife, who is Sun Chen's sister, and he wakes to find the Inner Palace surrounded. Deposed and degraded to princely rank as Prince of Kuaiji.