The Power and the Glory

Book 3 Chapter XIV: Skeletons in the Closet

"Ow!"

Her head snapped round. The constable was hopping on one leg and clutching his ankle.

"Bloody thing bit me," he complained, glaring at one of the skeletons. He hit its skull with the statue.

All things considered it was astonishingly easy to destroy the skeletons. Apart from the one that bit the constable, none of them tried to fight back. In that way at least they were as stupid as Abi's creations. Within an hour all of their skulls had been crushed.

Kitri said, "We'll have to check the rest of the graves in the morning." Mentally she added, And I'll have to tell Abi.

It was too much of a coincidence to think this had nothing to do with her necromancy.

~~~~

Once it began to rain in Gengxin the rain tended to last for days. Combine the terrible weather with how Mirio couldn't visit any of his cousins even if he wanted to, and he ended up spending most of his time indoors. News from the rest of the palace came every day. It was never encouraging. The Fifth Prince was near death. The Second Princess had taken ill too. Still there were no reports of anyone else catching the disease.

With how many of his cousins were sick, it would soon be easy to deduce who had cast the curse just by seeing who was left unharmed. That thought niggled at Mirio endlessly. His cousins weren't exactly geniuses, but surely even they would know cursing their siblings would only raise questions about their continued good health. Was Lian wrong? Was it not a curse after all?

Or, even more alarming, was it a curse cast by someone else entirely?

If it was one of his cousins there was an obvious motive: to get rid of the competition for the throne. Add in other suspects and the motives became much less obvious. What would an outsider have to gain from killing off most of the royal family? Revenge, personal dislike, or simply making it easier to stage a coup were all potential options. The more Mirio thought about it the more possibilities he came up with. At this rate the entire kingdom would become suspects.

In an effort to find something else to do he took it upon himself to teach Zi Yao how to play noyo[1]. After the first two games Zi Yao got the hang of it and won every time, to the amusement of Lian and Lady Yuan. Mirio continued to play even when he kept losing spectacularly. It kept Zi Yao happy and it passed the time, so what did it matter that he was losing to a child?

At least he had one consolation. Lian was even worse at the game than Mirio was. No one who witnessed it would ever forget his bewildered expression when he lost a game before he had the chance to move a single piece.

When not playing with Zi Yao or making polite conversation with Lady Yuan, Mirio began to think more and more about Lian. All sorts of little things he'd overlooked were now popping up. None of them were sinister in and of themselves, but they were certainly odd.

Lian had very expensive clothes, and apparently had almost bankrupted himself buying them. He had so little money right now that he had to save up just to buy sweets for Zi Yao. Lian never sent or received any letters. As far as anyone knew he had no friends outside the palace. Yet every week he had a day off and disappeared for the entire day -- unless Zi Yao's health had taken a sudden turn for the worse. No one knew where he went on those days. Lian spoke multiple languages, could draw Saoridhin calligraphy of the Biarorth style, but claimed his family were only shopkeepers.

That claim would have fooled anyone except Mirio. Unfortunately for Lian, Mirio had a Saoridhian foster sister and had witnessed the debates between his parents and hers on how to ensure her education covered everything taught in Saoridhlém as well as everything taught in Seroyawa. He knew more about Saoridhin calligraphy than he knew what to do with. There were at least twenty different styles of calligraphy, all taught with different methods, with rules about who used which style. A shopkeeper's family would have learnt -- assuming his memory wasn't playing tricks on him -- either the Ondern or Aivranto styles. The Biarorth style was taught only to aristocrats and royals. Mirio remembered Abi's grumbles about how complicated it was too well to forget what it looked like.