Bishop Kaku

Kaku had spent his hot-headed youth at war with his own nature — furious at the light squares he couldn't touch.

There had been a game where the one piece he needed to catch sat, maddeningly, on a light square, one single square off his diagonal, close enough to see and utterly out of reach. Kaku had slid and slid, hunting an angle that did not exist, growing more frantic each turn, until in his frustration he flung himself into a bad square and was captured for nothing. He had lost the whole game not because his enemy was clever but because he could not accept the shape of himself.

Turned around in the wrong colours afterward (as the valley's fallen pieces always are), Kaku brooded. And an old long-range piece drifted up beside him and said: "You keep raging at the squares you can't reach. Have you ever counted the ones you can?"

Kaku hadn't. When he did, he was astonished. From the right square, his diagonals reached into every quarter of the board at once — he ruled two whole slanting highways that crossed the entire valley. He had been so busy mourning the light squares that he'd never noticed he was one of the longest-reaching pieces alive on the dark ones. "I don't need every square," he said slowly, the anger draining out of him. "I need the right square — the one where my slants own the most of the board. Stop hunting what I can't have. Set up where what I have is strongest."

At the House of Study, Kaku slid gracefully across the threshold on a long diagonal, and the Head of the House watched him come.

"A bishop," she said. "Half the board is closed to you forever. Some would say that makes you half a piece."

"Some would say that having never sat still long enough to notice how far my open half reaches," said Kaku. "Every student you have wastes their strongest pieces by parking them where they can barely do anything. I can teach the hardest lesson a powerful piece ever learns — that raw power is nothing without the right place. A bishop on a bad square is a joke. A bishop on the right diagonal is a terror across the whole board. The difference isn't the bishop. It's the square." He came to rest on a long open slant. "I can teach them to stop moving their strong pieces around, and start placing them where they rule."

"Teach it," said the Head. "Most of them think power is a thing you have. You know it's a thing you aim."

Kaku's student was an impatient piece named Sora who owned strong long-range pieces and used them terribly — shoving them onto whatever square was nearest, blocking their own lines with their own soldiers, so that her mighty sliders sat penned in behind walls, seeing nothing, doing nothing.

"You've got a bishop that could cut this whole board in half," Kaku told her, "and you've buried it behind three of your own pawns. It can't see past its own doorstep. Watch." He slid onto a long, gloriously open diagonal — one that reached from her own back rank all the way into the enemy's — and suddenly three of Sora's opponent's pieces were pinned under the threat of his gaze. "I didn't get stronger. I got placed. Clear your bishop's diagonal. Give it a slant that runs the length of the valley. Then don't move it at all — just let it rule from there while your other pieces do the walking."

Sora looked at her penned-in sliders, and then, one careful move at a time, she opened a lane for the bishop and let it stretch out along a long clear diagonal. She didn't move it again for six turns. She didn't have to. It sat there, cool and far-seeing, quietly deciding what was allowed to happen on half the board.

"It's doing more standing still than it ever did running around," Sora said, amazed.

"That," said Kaku, "is what it means to be placed instead of merely powerful."