Captain Crossfire

Crossfire was not born loud, but he was born early, and he has been making up for it ever since.

His actual name is Henrik Vohrn. He came from a southern garrison town called Vohrnmouth — narrow streets, a long curving harbour, a fish market at one end and a watch-barracks at the other. His parents were both fishmongers. They are still fishmongers, after forty years of fishmongering. They write him letters once a month and address them to Henrik, not Captain Crossfire, because they have refused, on principle, to acknowledge that the new name is the official one. He keeps the letters in a small wooden box at the academy.

He joined the watch at nineteen. He was promoted twice in his first three years, both times against his commanding officer's recommendation, because his commanding officer thought he was — and this is a direct quote from the personnel file — "insufferable, but reliable."

His job as a junior officer was to lead a small unit of watch-soldiers on patrols through the harbour district, which was a logistical nightmare for several reasons at once. Warehouses pressed against each other along narrow lanes. Market stalls appeared in the morning and disappeared by evening, like a tide that obeyed the calendar rather than the moon. There were, in summary, a great many ways for a person to get jumped from behind by an opportunistic thief.

Vohrn lost two soldiers to such jumpings during his first six months. They had not been seriously hurt. But they had been profoundly embarrassed, which Vohrn took personally because he was their commanding officer and embarrassment, he believed, was preventable in a way that bruises were not. He thought about this problem a great deal. He thought about it loudly. He thought about it on long walks, on short walks, at breakfast, and once — memorably — during a wedding. The wedding was his cousin's. The cousin has forgiven him, mostly, in the years since.

The conventional answer — the answer his commanding officer kept patiently suggesting from across the room — was the obvious one: patrol in tighter formation. Put the soldiers closer together. Have them watch one another's backs. Reduce the gaps.

Vohrn tried it. It mostly worked. The thieves adjusted. They started aiming at the very front of the formation instead of the very back, and the back of the formation could not turn around fast enough to provide useful support. The unit had become a closer cluster, but the front of the cluster was now exposed in a new and equally embarrassing way.

Vohrn was, by this point in his career, very frustrated. He swore a great deal. He wrote angry letters that he then crumpled up and discarded before posting. He stomped through the harbour at night with his hands clenched behind his back and his coat dragging through the puddles, and he thought, over and over again, in a slowly tightening loop:

The problem is that we're all moving at the same time.

This thought, when it eventually arrived in completed form, was so quiet that even Vohrn (who is, as has been mentioned, loud) heard it as a whisper. He stopped walking. He looked at the harbour. He sat down.

The harbour had a long row of bollards along its edge — short fat iron posts that fishermen tied their boats to in all kinds of weather. Vohrn sat on one of them.

He sat for nearly an hour without moving. He watched the boats come in. He watched the deckhands hopping between vessels with the casual confidence of people who fall into water for a living. He watched, in particular, a small dinghy moored alongside a much larger trade-ship. The dinghy was tied to the trade-ship with a single rope. When the wind shifted, the dinghy moved — but the trade-ship did not. The trade-ship had been there all afternoon. The trade-ship had appeared, to anybody walking by on the dock, to be a permanent part of the landscape.

And from behind the trade-ship, every now and then, a fisherman with a long pole would casually reach out and check a crab pot that the dinghy's movement had revealed.

The trade-ship hadn't moved.

The dinghy had.

The crab pot got checked.

Vohrn stood up so suddenly that he nearly fell into the harbour. He walked home. He drew a diagram by lamp-light, several diagrams in fact, each one labelled with increasingly enthusiastic exclamation marks. He did not sleep that night, although he tried briefly around three in the morning.

The next morning he proposed, to his commanding officer, a new patrol formation. It was not tighter. It was, in fact, looser. He proposed that the unit move in a staggered pattern — one or two soldiers visibly walking through the district, the others positioned at fixed posts, hidden behind market stalls and warehouse corners, not moving at all. When a thief approached the visible soldiers, the visible soldiers would simply move aside — and reveal, behind them, a line of fixed posts with crossbows already aimed at the place the thief was standing.

The commanding officer said, after a long thoughtful silence, "That is the most absurd plan I have heard this year."

The commanding officer let him try it.

It worked spectacularly. Two thieves were apprehended in the first week. Three more in the second. The total apprehensions for the month were higher than the previous year's annual total for the harbour district. The commanding officer, who had been doing his job for thirty-one years and was not a fool, promoted Vohrn again. He also, after consulting with his deputy over a long lunch, gave him a nickname.

Captain Crossfire.

"Because," the commanding officer said dryly, over the soup course, "you stand still, and the attack comes from behind you, and the thief never sees the second line until it is too late."

The nickname stuck immediately, the way the best nicknames do. Vohrn liked it. He used it on his next promotion paperwork. By the time he was thirty, Captain Crossfire appeared on every official document in the kingdom, and Henrik Vohrn appeared only on his mother's monthly letters.

He retired from the watch at thirty-eight, with full honours and several commendations he did not display in his office because he found them embarrassing. He had, by then, become a famous tactician in certain circles. The kingdom's chess academy invited him to come and teach. They had, they explained in their letter of invitation, recently identified the discovered attack — the move where you shift one piece aside to reveal an attack from a second piece behind it — as one of the most under-taught tactical patterns in the kingdom's training programmes. The academy needed someone to teach it. They wanted a teacher who understood it in his bones.

Captain Crossfire said, "HA!"

He said this loudly.

He has been teaching the discovered attack ever since, with no apparent decrease in volume or enthusiasm.

He has, this morning in the academy hall, just finished his fourth demonstration of the day. The children are still leaning forward in their benches. He likes that about children. They never get tired of AHA. He sometimes wonders, privately, in the quiet moment before he falls asleep at night, whether the adults in his life have ever leaned forward in quite the same way. He suspects, on the balance of evidence, that they have not. He does not mind.

A small student — eight years old, with a fork-pin in her hair — raises her hand carefully.

"Captain Crossfire," she says, "what if the front piece is also a piece I want to keep? What if I don't want it to move?"

Crossfire grins. It is the slow, deliberate grin of a man who has been quietly waiting for this exact question all morning.

"AHA!" he says. "AHA — but — listen. The front piece doesn't have to die. The front piece just has to get out of the way. It can move to another square. A safe square. A useful square. The discovered attack is not a sacrifice. It is a reveal. The trade-ship doesn't sink. The dinghy doesn't drown. The crab pot just gets checked."

Glass Lantern, sitting near the back of the hall in her usual spot by the window, smiles very faintly. Glass Lantern's smile is a thing that requires close attention to see at all. The Captain has, over the years of their partnership, learned to look for it. He nods at her across the hall. She nods back. They are co-teaching this kit. She is the quietest person he has ever respected.