Von Agrippin's rooms were located in the western part of the university, on the second floor of the building reserved for professors and other scholars. She found the right door, a plain oak door with a small slate plaque bearing his name, and knocked.
Shortly thereafter, he opened the door for her. The expensive, continental-style burgundy doublet he was wearing was the same one he wore for lectures, but his hair was tied back a little looser than usual, so that a dark strand fell across his face, which he brushed back with a casual gesture.
"Valentina." He smiled and stepped aside. "Come in."
The room was modest but furnished with obvious care. His study doubled as a living room and had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along two walls. A small dining table by the window was set for two, with plenty of red wine in a bulbous carafe and all sorts of delicacies that quite obviously did not come from the university kitchen. Through a half-open door, she could make out a bedroom.
Johann gallantly took her warm cloak and hung it on a hook next to the door before turning back to her. But instead of leading her to the table, he stopped in front of her and looked at her with that attentive intensity of his.
"Take off your clothes," he said.
He said it quite casually and politely, and that was precisely why it took Valentina a moment to be sure she had heard correctly.
"What?" said Valentina.
"Oh," said Vyxara and the demon's voice was like honey in Valentina's head.
Johann crossed his arms and leaned slightly against the edge of the table. "Of course, there is the theoretical possibility that I have completely misinterpreted the signals between us over the past few weeks," he said in the same calm tone. "But I don't think so."
Valentina felt her heart pounding against her ribs. She had expected to be courted. Cosimo had deployed a whole repertoire of gifts, hints, and carefully staged moments before making his intentions clear.
"What about dinner?" she asked, feeling a little proud that her voice sounded so calm.
"Dinner is for later." He flashed his half-smile again. "Take your clothes off."
Valentina looked at him. The attentive eyes, the high cheekbones, the cultivated carelessness of his perpetual three-day stubble. This man, who was perhaps the most exciting intellectual encounter of her life so far, and who now assumed with absolute certainty that he would have her.
Her pulse was racing, but her hands were completely still as she reached behind her and untied the strings of her red dress, letting it slowly slide from her shoulders to the floor.
~
The bed was really too small for two people. Valentina's shoulder pressed against the wall, and Johann's left foot jutted out over the edge of the bed, but neither of them cared in the slightest.
Johann lay still for a moment, with his eyes closed and a contented smile on his lips. Then he sat up, swung his legs out of bed, and stood. He disappeared briefly into the study and returned with the carafe of wine, two mugs, and a platter of food, which he set out on the narrow nightstand and the edge of the bed.
"The table seems like an unreasonable distance to me right now," he said as he lay back down next to her and handed her a mug. "And besides, it's cold over there."
The wine was excellent. "Where did you get that?"
"From the southern Niehrland," Johann replied to her question. "From a winemaker in the hills two days' ride south of Agrippin, whom a colleague recommended to me." The man used to be a scholar and is a veritable genius who at some point decided to grow wine instead. But as a winemaker, he's completely unknown because he refuses to sell to merchants. You have to go there in person and offer him an interesting conversation, otherwise he'll send you away."
"Now I almost feel like going there and giving it a try."
"I think you'd get along. He's annoyed by anyone who isn't as smart as he is, which means he's almost always annoyed." Johann dipped a candied pear into the small bowl of cream sitting on the platter and held it to Valentina's lips. "Here. This is a popular treat back home."
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
The pear was delicious, sweet and buttery with a hint of cinnamon, and the cream was fresh. When a drop of it ran down her chin, Johann wiped it away with his thumb and licked it off himself.
And then they talked, quite casually and relaxed, while he fed her candied pears with cream.
Valentina finally got around to asking a question that had been on her mind for weeks: why Zît was so stubbornly resisting the experimental verification of his theory of transformation.
"I think it's because Zît is the only Essence whose geometric symmetries cannot be represented in the three dimensions of space," he said, making a gesture with the hand that wasn't currently dipping another pear into the cream, as if he were trying to draw a complicated invisible structure in the air. "It behaves fundamentally differently because its symmetry operations aren't commutative, by which I mean, the order in which you apply them changes the result. At least, that's my theory."
"And you haven't found the right order yet?"
"Exactly. I'm pretty sure that the Grundgestalt itself isn't three-dimensional at all, but four-dimensional, or at least has a four-dimensional component, and that the fourth dimension isn't a spatial one but a temporal one that interacts with Zît, but to prove that experimentally…" He shook his head. "In any case, I haven't succeeded so far."
Valentina thought about her own experience with time distortion during the sessions with the Eye of Deceit. Of course, that had nothing directly to do with Johann's research, and she obviously couldn't tell him about it, but it did suggest that temporal oddities were indeed occurring closer to the Grundgestalt.
"What are your thoughts on my stability problem with permanent architectural patterns?" she asked instead, steering the conversation toward her own project. "I'm stuck on the correlation between coupled constraints. The constraints in adjacent rings of the cascade aren't independent of one another, and if I reduce one without taking the coupling into account, stability at the interface might collapse."
Johann listened attentively, mechanically dipping another pear into the cream and holding it to her lips. "Have you tried modeling the coupled restrictions as a single system instead of treating them individually?"
"Yes, but the system becomes so complex that the fault prediction becomes practically unsolvable."
He was silent for a moment, and she could basically see him thinking. Then he sat up and reached for a sheet of parchment, already half-scribbled on, and a charcoal pencil, which were apparently kept on the nightstand precisely for such occasions.
"What if you don't treat the coupling as additional complexity, but as a boundary condition?" he said, and began to draw a geometric sketch, naked and with cream at the corner of his mouth, and Valentina thought he had never looked more attractive than at that very moment. "Look. If the constraints are correlated, then the correlation itself defines a permissible range within which stability is guaranteed, and then you don't have to calculate the entire fault prediction for the complete system. You just have to show that your optimized patterns remain within this permissible range."
Valentina stared at the sketch. It was so elegant that she was annoyed she hadn't thought of it herself. Basically, the coupling actually even simplified the problem because it drastically reduced the space of possible solutions.
"That," she said slowly, "might actually work."
"Feel free to come back to me with it once you've worked through the calculations." He put down the charcoal pencil and poured more wine. "Tell me about the Greystone Cascade. What's it like to work with?"
So she told him about the Cascade, about the architectural rings, and the way the Leb-Essence was channeled and concentrated through the tiers. And she described to him the modification that she and Lorenzo had developed together with Master Wilford to prevent wound infections, explaining that it was based on Wilford's theory about invisibly tiny creatures and her own water-purification pattern.
"And you used a Zît anchor for that?" he asked, his voice now taking on a tone she hadn't heard from him before, a kind of incredulous amazement. "That must have been incredibly complicated."
"It really was. We worked on it with a total of five Weavers, but without Master Wilford's experience, it would never have worked."
"This Wilford seems to be a fascinating character." Johann nodded thoughtfully. "I probably would have considered his theory to be completely outlandish as well, but your results are, of course, extremely compelling evidence, regardless of what intuition says. Invisibly tiny creatures invading our bodies. Who would have thought."
The conversation drifted on, to his travels through Northern Padavo and the Free City-States, and a hilarious anecdote about a scholar in Nasille, to university gossip from Othal and Bridgewater, and from there to the difference between the academic cultures in Sommerland and on the continent.
And the whole time, he fed her those delicious candied pears and other sweets.
"You're happy," Vyxara observed, purring like a fat cat basking in the sun.
Valentina was indeed happy. She didn't answer at all, but simply took the moment in, savoring the taste of the wonderful wine and the candied pears, stretching out on the rough linen and looking at the man beside her, who was so brilliant it almost hurt, and who was now feeding her cream again, which she licked off his finger with relish.
"By the way," said Johann, leaning back against the wall, "I also have a place in the city, because this university lodging is a little too ascetic for me in the long run." He looked at her with his half-smile. "Next time I'll take you there, it's a bit more comfortable. Besides, the walls here are pretty thin, and you were, well…" He laughed mischievously. "A little loud."
Valentina felt the blush rise to her cheeks. That didn't usually happen to her anymore. At least not the blushing, not so much the being loud part. She couldn't help that.
"Next time," Vyxara repeated in her head, and the emphasis was exactly where Valentina's attention was focused as well.
"Should I walk you home?" he asked a little later, as she was getting dressed.
"That's very kind of you, but it really isn't necessary."
He stood in the doorway, his doublet casually thrown over his shoulders and open, watching her adjust her braid. "It was a lovely evening."
"It really was," said Valentina.
He leaned forward and kissed her goodbye, briefly and tenderly, with a casualness that suggested there would be more kisses like that to come.