"Sparkling!" Ulia's voice roared, rattling the plaster-work. "The boy's nothing but a mass of soot!"
Miliana crammed her backside against a wall, hiding the telltale handprint on her rear.
"Charcoal absorbs foul smells, Ulia. 'Tis a well-known fact."
"Is it? Is it indeed?" Ulia squared her shoulders and narrowed down her eyes. "Cleaner or no cleaner, his presence serves as a distraction. And I must say that I find it most unsuitable for you to be sharing a room alone with a male commoner." Ulia pulled a quizzing glass from her cleavage and used it to examine the young man as though he were a particularly noisome species of bug. "Goodness-why does he smell of eels?"
"I have no idea, milady."
"Hmmmmph." Ulia sank her lens back into its cavernous hiding place. "Well, as long as he's here, have him search the wainscoting; a large green furry thing has just made off with a dried hogfish from the kitchen shelf. The vermin in this palace are becoming quite unforgivable!"
Ulia hitched up her skirts, tried to walk through the door and managed to get her hat jammed in the doorframe. She ponderously maneuvered herself about and began to sidle past the obstacle, meanwhile fixing the hapless Lorenzo beneath her baleful eye.
"Young man, you have my permission to continue with your duties-but pray, do not be long. The young lady has research of the utmost importance to attend to. The security of Sumbria itself may one day rest upon her work."
The door closed with a titanic slam, leaving Miliana and Lorenzo to slump against the bookshelves in relief. The girl finally managed to peel herself away from the marble and wearily opened her speaking box; the sound of her own voice dragging its way through chapter seventy one, paragraph six: "Charges dovetail and counter dovetail and their acute relevance to social graces…" masked their conversation from eavesdroppers in the corridor.
Lorenzo half crouched, searching the wainscoting for signs of errant green furry things.
"What's a hogfish?"
"It doesn't matter." Miliana collapsed into a chair, remembered the charcoal mark on her backside, and decided that she didn't care. The girl wearily rubbed beneath her spectacles and massaged her eyes. "Now look-Lothario-"
"Lorenzo! Lorenzo Utrelli…"
"… Da tiddly-pom and tiddly-dee. Yes…" Miliana suddenly sat bolt upright in her chair. "You picked that lock! You're not supposed to be in here."
The young man-a handsome creature in an ink-stained sort of way-skittered aside like a nervous stick bug.
"Yes I am! I'm a guest! I just… just… just didn't have a key…"
"So you're a guest, are you?" Miliana vaguely remembered seeing the man before, but for the life of her she couldn't remember just quite where. "Well what do you want the library for?"
"Study!" Lorenzo left a trail of soot behind him as he crossed the polished marble floor. "Sumbria has some of the best books there are. It must be terribly interesting living here."
"That all depends on what you're allowed to do with your time." Miliana scowled, fixed her gaze on the intruder, and crinkled up her speckled nose. "Now, look-I'm not so sure you should be allowed in here."
The young man never even heard her. He crouched forward to inspect Miliana's magical speaking box, his face glowing with rapturous fascination.
"Oh-oh, this is wonderful! Superb!" Lorenzo turned to stare at Miliana with awe and excitement shining in his eyes. "Are you a sorceress?"
Miliana almost said "no"-and then the tone of respect in the young man's voice brought her up short. She drew erect, preened like a heron, and attempted to act terribly, terribly wise.
"Yes. Yes, I am, actually."
"And so they actually make you study!" Lorenzo sat himself down in a cloud of cinders and dust. "Back at home, they've banned me from every library in town. They say I'm disruptive." The Lomatran avidly examined Miliana's arrangement of the box and speaking trumpet. "This is fascinating. Now, you see, this has bearing on some of my own studies. I am exploring the possibility that sound can be translated into peaks and waves."
Miliana raised one eyebrow and peered at her companion through her pretty freckles.
"How would that be useful?"
"Ah-but perhaps it might be!" Lorenzo spread the drawing of a machine out across the table. "Here, you see? This machine uses a membrane to pick up sound, vibrating as noise contacts the membrane. The vibrations make this needle jump and change the score written on this parchment scroll, which is dragged slowly past the needle by these little springs! Now all I need to do is somehow reverse the process, find a way of reading the jump marks on the parchment, and we can make a re-playable mechanical recording of any sound we desire." The young man puffed out his chest in pride. "You see? The job's half done!"
Miliana leaned back in her chair and fixed her companion with a droll, sarcastic stare.
"You must be from the country."
Lorenzo instantly turned upon her a pair of eyes utterly alive with passion-a face so filled with fire that it welded the girl hard into her seat.
"Not from the country… of the country!" The boy slapped his hands onto the table and leaned toward Miliana, who leaned backward in her chair in blank surprise. "It's time to liberate the people from the tyranny of magic! Don't you see that a system of mechanics is the only means of ever freeing the world from mere autocracy?"
"You're right. I don't." Miliana speared forward, sharp light glinting from her lenses. "Magic is the one thing that anyone can have. The one thing that can free us from-from being ordinary!"
"Aha! Aha!" Lorenzo stuck a finger up into the air, dislodging a shower of grime into his cuff. "And how is this achieved? Through hard study. Through long, arduous learning and dedication! It's repression through and through!"
Moving from scorn to absolute irritation, Miliana folded up her arms.
"Look, I fail to see how my sitting on my noble backside reading books on magic represses a bunch of people that I've never even met."
"Well, that's my point, you see." Lorenzo threw open his arms, frightening the green furry thing sleeping on the mantelpiece. "Sorcery is only learned through long years of very intensive, very expensive study. Only the nobility can afford it-placing magic squarely in the hands of the autocratic classes. If there's ever going to be any real equality, we have to place a means of power into the hands of the masses!"
The girl stared at him in absolute bewilderment.
"What do you want to go around giving power to the masses for?"
"So that they can take part in the process of their own political rule!"
"Political rule?" Miliana blinked in amazement. "Have you sat back and watched what these palace dwellers do to each other all day? It's daggers in the back and internecine warfare twenty-four hours a day! If you go around getting everyone to carry on like that, we'll all be dead within a week!"
"Well, I don't mean that everyone should kill each other." Lorenzo ran fingers through his hair, disturbing a sooty spider which absailed quickly down to the floor. "I mean that we can break people away from the current tyranny of study!"
Miliana bridled.
"What have you got against study?"
"It is class prejudicial!"
"But you study!" Miliana pointed a finger straight at Lorenzo's nose. "You already admitted that you study things!"
"Um…" Lorenzo blinked, then hit upon an explanation. "Ah, yes, but only to serve a noble end!"