#i have used the translation of 'hanya' as jackdaw rather than raven

[anagrammaddict]

jackdaw, wheeling in the sunset

In the mountain, there is a jackdaw with feathers whetted into spines and blackened with poison, with eyes that chase the sun as it wheels across the sky, before dipping behind the snow-scabbed slopes.

-

Everyone who lives in the mountain is nameless, and so is the jackdaw. The jackdaw is known as Hanya Si, which is not a name, but an assignment.

-

The jackdaw scavenges for young orphans on the streets, those who are also nameless and fateless, to be consumed by Wufeng, the mountain. These foundlings will die anyway, snagged by their own downy wings among the thicket of knives that is the jianghu. The jackdaw sends them to the killing pools in the depths of the mountain, and teaches them to turn against others, and most importantly, teaches them to claw and slither and writhe and live by any means possible.

-

Too much yin in your body, a swindler of a physician tells him, grabbing his wrist on the street and trying to sell him a pill the size of an oriole egg.

The physician is dead by nightfall.

That is what happens when you look into the eye of Wufeng and feel the stab of its pulse and tap into the snakes' nest of its meridians.

-

Yun Weishan and Yun Que are not the real names of the pair of wishbone sisters that the jackdaw comes to care for.

All his other nestlings are dead. Some of them have been killed by the jackdaw himself, either by swift merciful strikes in the dark, or gentle poisonings that make them drowse off into dream and never wake up. Those are the weak ones, doomed to fail if Wufeng sent them out on its missions. Better for them to die painlessly by his hands, than be caught alive by Wufeng's enemies, and have their bodies and minds stripped away, sliver by sliver, down to bone and keening ghost.

The Yun sisters are not blood sisters; they meet for the first time, among a crowd of other Wufeng novices, calf-deep in the icy mire of the mountain's killing pool.

The moment of first eye contact between them is a lightning strike of a pact. Together, they slaughter everyone else in the pool.

They become attached to each other, sharing everything from food to bedding to half-remembered poems, to the dangerous wishes that they shouldn't make. They don't laugh openly, and they are careful with their talk as they move around the mountain, but Hanya Si knows that they dream, fiercely: in each other's arms, in resolute whispers, in torn lips where wounds translate to promises, in the back-and-forth transactions of jolting awake to nightmares and forlornly consoling the other.

The fused pair of them are a puzzling strut of iron-cold hope and despair that sits in Hanya Si's chest, clamping his heart, and he loves them both, unwittingly.

-

Ah, the sun! That distant three-legged crow that Hanya Si has always dreamed of catching. The blinding mass of it, racing away, always away, from the corpse of this earth.

-

Yun Que is a sparrow of a girl, the smaller and the stronger of the sisters: unassuming and pleasant, perfect for infiltration missions.

But if a bird mother can have favourites in its brood, then it is Yun Weishan that Hanya Si secretly favours.

He found her as a tiny child, wandering alone among the streets in the town of Lixi. Later, he learnt that her mother had been a despised concubine in the Yun household, who had hanged herself from the rafters of the family's ancestral hall, and after that, no one spared another glance at the leftover child.

Yun Weishan will be a different weapon: a bride. Wufeng will choose her groom, and she will go to him in a glittering sea of dowry, red as hawthorn and gold as the sun-touched clouds.

Hanya Si trains the Yun sisters ruthlessly. He cuts them down. He drags them through cycles of poisons and antidotes. Too often, his hands have crushed their windpipes to an inch of their last breath.

Wufeng will never be done with them, he tells them. Wufeng will take their bones when they die.

He teaches them the ways of the jianghu and its array of mannerisms and social codes. He teaches them to sketch maps in their eyelids, carry poisons in their sleeves, lower their lashes and offer only veiled eye contact with their potential targets. To fit themselves into stolen names. To scheme from the peripheries. To usurp positions and infiltrate hierarchies. To spin words into consolation, pry out layers of information. To impersonate sincerity. To kill in many ways and with nothing in hand. To die in many ways and still with nothing in hand.

Better to die than be caught alive by Wufeng's enemies.

He also feeds them and treats their wounds and teaches them to identify medicinal herbs and brew antidotes.

Wufeng will never let you go, he tells them over and over.

But he also tells them, if you ever find a way, then go, and never turn around, not even for a last glance. Never look back at the mountain.

This is the only conspiracy that he seeds into their hearts.

He shares bitter wine with the sisters in the evenings, by the light of the dying sky. In the shadows, leaning close toward each other, they look like a grim hook of a bird mother and its two starved fledglings, trapped in a desolate nest.

And every time, the sun leaves them behind on the mountain.

-

Wufeng turns everything into a weapon.

The sisters dream of freedom. That becomes a weapon.

Hanya Si falls in disconsolate love with the sun. The sun becomes a weapon.

Hanya Si stays away from the sun, thinking he will learn to live in its shadow. But that too, is a weapon against him.

-

Yun Que dies first.

Hanya Si buries her himself on a wind-chewed plateau, clawing the scree apart and lowering her into the unwilling earth. Neither she nor the mountain want each other.

Yun Weishan, not trusting the mystery around her sister's death, never truly forgives him.

-

You will never see the peak of the mountain that is Wufeng. You will never see the tip of the knife that is Wufeng.

The peak is hidden in thick cloud, unlit by the sun. You cannot map the land around the mountain, nor can you find your bearings; the mountain will not help you.

As for the knife that is Wufeng, they say it has many points and no point, shrouded in darkness, moving too swiftly for the naked eye to detect. Even when the blade strikes, you will never see its tip, because by then it will be buried deep in your heart, and nothing is more opaque than the human heart.

Or perhaps the truth is that Wufeng is just another broken knife of the jianghu; it doesn't need a single point; every edge cuts just as sharply.

-

He tells Yun Weishan to go. She has passed the test.

But the jackdaw, nameless and fateless, remains where he is, on the carnage-strewn steps where a procession of blood-red brides had passed earlier.

Yun Weishan is a fleeting cloud at the edge of his sight. To look upon her face again would be hope and despair for them both.

But she will not turn around. She will never be a bird, but still he has primed her for flight all her life, and now she has fledged. He too, has passed the test.

Hanya Si kneels on the steps, the shadow of the mountain cold on his shoulders, a broken wishbone in his chest, piercing his heart.

Yun Weishan disappears. But something else takes her place: a warm wind, a cascade of blazing pinions. The sun-crow's belly is low enough to singe his hair. It swoops low and ascends steeply before plummeting again, wheeling around him, turning cloud and roof into silhouette and embroidery and flame. Hanya Si raises his hand, reaching out to a light that is neither sunrise nor sunset, to catch a feather from those fiery wings.