Grandmother's Bronze Mirror

Before Lan Yingchen's grandmother died, she gave instructions that a bronze mirror was to go to him. A round mirror in the late-Qing, early-Republic style, the bronze body polished bright, a few scratches on the face, just the right size to sit in the palm; ordinarily he keeps it in an inside coat pocket or the innermost layer of his school bag.

What is really wrong with it is the back of the mirror. The pattern there is exactly the cracked ring he sees in mid-air—the same gap, falling in the same place between the three- and four-o'clock marks. And this pattern is in no catalogue of bronze mirrors, official-cast or privately cast, of the Qing.

It gives off heat, and no rule can be seen in the timing. At the letter boxes on the ground floor of the apartment block it warmed faintly through the cloth, like a fingertip laid against it for half a second and then taken away. At noon in the classroom, waiting for a letter that should have disappeared and had not, it was hot enough to feel like a hand pressed against his ribs. Standing at the foot of the stone steps in front of the temple, looking up at the ring above the temple roof, it was clearest of all. Hold it up so that it and the ring in mid-air overlap in the line of sight, and the two gaps line up the way the needle of a luopan compass lines up: same direction, no deviation. Later a very faint bronze halo surfaced along the edge of the gap on the back of the mirror, the same colour as the halo along the edges of the four characters of the Myriad Academy on that letter of admission.

Objects of that same old make are not limited to this one mirror. In his grandmother's sitting room there was a bronze bell the size of half a fist, which she said was for making offerings to the Earth God and had come down from her own grandma's grandma; on the low table in the inspector's counselling office there is one almost identical; and a classmate in the Eastern College has one on his desk, left by his grandfather, three generations back and more. The inspector who picked this mirror up at the intersection turned it over and looked at the back for about half a second before handing it back—a counsellor on her way home from work does not spend that half second.

On the night the White Tower's bell rang, the mirror was locked in the bottom of the bedside cabinet in the dormitory. Across the whole College, that direction still carried a little more weight than any other. When going to visit the College of another lineage, the Eastern College's rule is to leave it in your own room: inside the Middle-Eastern College objects are easily "read", and while the host will not read them on purpose, the objects set out there may react on their own.

His grandmother never explained where this mirror came from. All she left at the end was one other line, which keeps surfacing in Lan Yingchen's mind: do not be afraid. But do not speak of it either.