Three swords screamed out of their scabbards as one, and Leibniz glanced up to discover the blades—quite a bit shinier than his—triangulated on the base of his neck. In the same instant—possibly because he had gone slack with terror—the tip of his blade happened to blunder into his scabbard, and down it slid, until rust-blockages froze it about halfway in. Leibniz’s arms had dropped to his sides like damp hawsers. The heavy guard of his rapier reciprocated back and forth on its springy blade going wuv, wuv, wuv. Twenty-five-year-old Peter Romanov entered the room on the arm of twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Charlotte. Or Leibniz (who was standing motionless, with his chin high in the air to keep it from being shaved) assumed this fellow must be the Tsar, from the fact that he was the tallest human being that Leibniz had set eyes on in his whole life. For all his immensity, he had a gracefully drawn-out frame, and his face—clean-shaven except for a dark moustache—still had a boyish softness about it. When he tore his dark, quasi-Mongol eyes away from Sophie Charlotte (not easy in that she was very likely the most lovely and interesting female he had ever seen) and got a load of the tableau in the dining room, he came to a stop. His left eye twitched shut as if he were winking, then struggled open, then did it again. Then the whole left side of his face contorted as if an invisible hand had gripped his cheek and twisted it. He pulled free of Sophie Charlotte’s arm and clapped both hands over his face for a few moments, possibly from embarrassment and possibly to hide this twitching. Then both hands lunged out as he strode forward. He was so shockingly colossal that it seemed as if he were diving forward, launching himself towards his three guards like an immense bat. But he remained on his feet. He grabbed the two guards on the flanks by the scruffs of their necks and drew them together so that they collided with the one in the middle; and holding them all together in a bear-hug he screamed at them for a while in what Leibniz took to be the tongue of Muscovy. Leibniz stepped backwards until he was behind and beside Sophie, then got both hands together on his sword-pommel and rammed it all the way home in a series of sharp yanking gestures. By that time, Peter had switched over to whorehouse German. "I would borrow three large wheels!"