The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,211

placard.”

The helmet did look old enough. Rin could see little jade stones embedded into the forehead. She reached into the case, plucked the helmet out, and tried it on. It was uncomfortably cold, obstructively heavy. Quickly she pulled it off. “I don’t know how anyone managed to fight wearing this.”

“It’s ceremonial, probably,” Kitay said. “I doubt he actually wore it into battle. This place is loaded with his stuff—look, there’s his breastplate, and that’s his old tea set.”

His fingers hovered over the relics, as if he was too awed to touch them. But Rin, glancing about the hall, was struck with a deep sense of pity. The Red Emperor was the greatest man in Nikara history, a man so famous that every child in the Empire knew his name by the time they could speak. The myths about him could and did fill up entire bookshelves. He’d united the country for the very first time; he’d brought fire and bloodshed on a scale the land had never witnessed before; and he’d built cities that remained intellectual, cultural, and commercial centers of the Empire.

And now, a millennium later, all that remained were his helmet, his breastplate, and a tea set.

His dynasty had not even survived a generation. Upon his death his sons had immediately fallen upon each other, and after the centuries of bloodshed that followed, the Empire was split under a provincial system that the Red Emperor had not designed nor intended. His bloodline was lost, his heirs extinguished within the first twenty years of the civil war they started. If his line persisted, no one recognized it.

He was king for a day. For a brief moment, he stood in the center of the universe. And for what?

He should have married Tearza, Rin thought. He was a fool to make the shamans his enemies. He should have leashed them to his regime. He should have put a Speerly on the throne, and then his Empire would have lasted for an eternity. By now their heirs would have conquered the world.

“This one has your name on it,” Kitay called from farther down the hall.

“What?”

“Look.” He pointed. It was the sword—the twin of the one she’d lost in the water during the battle at the Red Cliffs, the second one crafted from Altan’s melted-down trident.

They’d kept it as a trophy. Speerly mineral, read the placard, last wielded by Fang Runin.

Rin drew the sword out of its case and blew the dust off the blade. She’d thought it had sunk to the bottom of the river forever.

Her placard was so small. There were no further details, no reports of her exploits, just her name and the weapon’s make. She snorted. That was just like Vaisra. If he’d had his way, then she would only ever have remained a footnote in history.

When they build museums to my regime, Vaisra, I won’t even give you a plaque.

Nearly half the artifacts were missing from their cases. They looked recently pilfered, likely by Republican leadership; dust hadn’t had time to settle in the outlines they left behind. Rin couldn’t tell by reading the plaques why some had been stolen and some were left behind; the missing items were valuables of all types from all eras, and appeared to have been packed away at random.

One empty case stood on a prominent display—a shelf protruding from the wall, rimmed with golden edges to draw the viewer’s attention.

Rin picked up the plaque.

Imperial Seal of the Red Emperor.

She nearly dropped it. Incredible. She’d learned about this seal at school. When the Red Emperor died, he’d declared that his seal could only pass, along with the mandate of heaven, to the next rightful ruler of the Empire. It was promptly stolen the morning after his funeral. In the centuries after, the seal changed hands between princes, generals, clever concubines, and assassins, followed wherever it went by a trail of blood. Three hundred years later it finally dropped off the historical record, though provincial Warlords still claimed occasionally to have it locked in their private vaults.

So the House of Yin had kept it all along.

Of course Nezha had taken it with him. Rin found that hilarious. He’d lost the country, but he’d taken the ruler’s mandate.

Keep it, asshole, she thought. Nezha could have the seal, and every other shiny piece of junk his staff had loaded into their wagons. It didn’t matter that those treasures were hallmarks of Nikara history. That history didn’t matter to Rin. It was a record of slavery, oppression,