Free The White Mirror by Elsa Hart Page B

stinging his cheeks.
    Campo’s face contorted in a grimace of pain. He tucked his chin and hunched his shoulders as if bracing himself against an attack. “The people who live in these places do not feel the cold as I do,” he said, his voice muffled by the wool and fur of his collar. “I will never become accustomed to it.”
    â€œThen let us go in out of the wind.” Li Du indicated the closed door on the right side of the temple.
    Campo lifted his face slowly out from his voluminous scarves. He directed an uncertain look at the door. “That is where the dead man lived,” he said. “It is where he performed his demonic conjurations.”
    Li Du hesitated for a moment, then started up the snowy steps. He spoke over his shoulder. “Whatever the history of this place, it is first and last a shelter from the mountain’s inhospitality. We offend no one by using it for that purpose.”
    He heard Campo’s step behind him. The wind blew again. The beams of the temple creaked. Li Du stamped the snow from his boots, took hold of the iron ring of the door, raised it, and allowed it to fall with a sharp clang. He listened, but no sound came from within. He pushed the door open and went inside.
    There was an odor in the air at once pleasant and disturbing, oily and leathery. Li Du inhaled deeply, identifying other scents: metal, wood, smoke, juniper. Perceiving movement in the upper periphery of his vision, he tilted his head back to look. Hanging from the ceiling were what appeared to be ribbons. They were flat and pale like skins discarded by snakes, and they swayed gently, caught by currents in the air.
    He examined the rest of the room. There were two doors in addition to the one through which he had come. One was to his left, and must, he thought, connect to the chapel. The other was directly across from him. Both were closed.
    With the exception of space allotted for doors, the walls of the room were lined from top to bottom with shelves cluttered with bowls and pots and jars and boxes. As his gaze rested on a tall jar of black ink sticks, Li Du recalled the similar jar that used to stand on the desk in his own tranquil copying room in the library.
    Campo had gone directly to the hearth in the corner. His boots left wet prints through the fine layer of ash that had been scattered by wind through the ventilation opening in the roof. Campo crouched and lifted a blackened pot from where it rested on an iron frame. He set the pot down on the floor beside several others and held his hands above the little pile of ash and scaly blackened wood. With a disappointed shake of his head, he stood up. He rubbed his hands together, then cupped his fingers and blew on them.
    â€œThe hearth is cold,” he said.
    Li Du continued to examine the contents of the shelves, marveling at the incongruous brightness of powdered pigments. “Did you meet him?”
    Campo sniffed. “I spoke to him.”
    â€œWhat was he like?”
    â€œThe devil held his tongue. He would say nothing to me.”
    Li Du glanced at Campo, who was now also examining the shelves. “I understand that he was preoccupied with his work and with his devotions,” Li Du said. “He abjured company and conversation.”
    Campo reached out to touch an open wooden box. “He behaved as if he could not see or hear me. He stood where I stand now, arranging and rearranging these vessels. I might have been invisible to him.” Campo sighed. “Perhaps I was. The devil deceives.”
    Campo drew something from the box and held it up. It was a thin, circular wafer as red as a poppy petal. “What is this?”
    Li Du took the wafer and turned it over in his hands. “It is cotton,” he said, “saturated with dye.” He returned it to Campo. “This is how it is transported and sold at markets. The red color is extracted with heat and water.”
    Campo replaced the wafer. “My