The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,188
collapsed, the caretakers remained employed, their salaries paid by one ruler or another out of reverence to the dead.
“Can you imagine such an old civilization built all this?” Kitay ran his hands across remarkably well-preserved limestone as they walked through the central cemetery, staking out vantage points for their artillery units. “They didn’t have anything like modern tools. I mean, they barely even had math.”
“Then how’d they manage it?” Venka asked.
“Sheer human labor. When you can’t figure something out, you just throw bodies at it.” Kitay pointed to the far end of the graveyard, where a forty-foot sculpture of the Red Emperor loomed over the ravine. “There are bones in that statue. Actually, there are probably bones in all these statues. The Red Emperor believed that human souls kept buildings structurally sound forever, so when the laborers were done chiseling his face into stone, he had them bound up and hurled into the hollow centers.”
Rin shuddered. “I thought he wasn’t religious.”
“He wasn’t a shaman. Still superstitious as fuck.” Kitay gestured to the monuments surrounding them. “Imagine you’re living in a land of beasts and Speerlies. Why wouldn’t you believe in spells?”
Rin craned her head up at the Red Emperor. His face had been weathered by time, but had retained its structural integrity well enough that she could still make out his features. He looked the same way he did on all the replicas she’d ever seen of his official portrait—a severe, humorless man whose expression displayed no kindness. Rin supposed he’d had to be cruel. A man who intended to stitch the disparate, warring factions of Nikan into a united empire had to have a ruthless, iron will. He couldn’t bend or break. He couldn’t compromise; he had to mold the world to his vision.
His first wife stood at the opposite end of the graveyard. The Winter Empress was famously beautiful and famously sad. She’d been born with such impossible, heavenly beauty that the Red Emperor had kidnapped her as a mere child and deposited her in his court. There, her constant weeping only heightened her beauty because it made her eyebrows arch and her lips purse in such an enticing manner that the Red Emperor would watch as she cried, fascinated and aroused.
According to the stories, she looked so beautiful when she was in pain that no one realized she was wasting away from a heart disease until one day she collapsed in the garden, fingers clawing futilely at her snow-white chest. In the old stories, that counted as romance.
But Rin recognized the stone face across the graveyard. And that wasn’t, couldn’t be, the Winter Empress.
“That’s Tearza,” she murmured, amazed.
“The Speerly queen?” Venka wrinkled her nose. “What are you talking about?”
Rin pointed. “Look around her neck. See that necklace? That’s a Speerly necklace.”
She’d seen that crescent moon pendant before in her dreams. She’d seen it hanging on Altan’s neck. She knew she couldn’t have imagined it; those visions were branded into her mind.
Why would the Red Emperor cast Tearza as his Empress?
Was it true, then, that they’d been lovers?
But all the tales said he’d tried to kill her. He’d sent assassins after her since the moment they met. He’d tried many times on the battlefield to take her head. He had been so afraid of her that he ensconced himself in an island hideout surrounded by water. When she’d died, he’d made her island his colony and her people his slaves.
Yet, Rin supposed, lovers could still inflict that kind of violence on each other. Hadn’t Riga loved Daji? Hadn’t Jiang loved Tseveri?
Hadn’t Nezha once loved her?
“If that’s Mai’rinnen Tearza,” Kitay said, “that’s a history no one’s ever written.”
“Only because the Red Emperor wrote her out of history,” Rin said. “Wrote her out so cleanly that no one even recognized her face.”
She had to respect the man. When you conquered as totally and completely as he had, you could alter the course of everything. You could determine the stories that people told about you for generations.
When they sing about me, she decided, Nezha won’t warrant even a mention.
Under her direction, the Southern Army finished preparing the city for Nezha’s arrival. They hid cannons behind every statue. They dug trenches and tunnels. They placed their sandbags around their forts. They staked out target points for Dulin, identifying weak points in the stone that could bring entire structures down on the Republican Army.
Then they hunkered down to wait.
Rainfall started that evening and continued steadily through the night, fat droplets hammering down in