"Pustules and scabbing blisters," Anita cursed to herself. She tilted her head, trying to use her hair and Leslie's rather expansive chest to hide her tears from becoming a public spectacle.

It wasn't the moment that had her eyes spurting like an Olencian water garden. It wasn't quite a dream of hers to dance in a hall like this with a man like this, though she may have made up a partner or two and waltzed in the engine room on their way here. And she hadn't recognized herself after Mercy had dolled her up.

But the veneer of civilization, of laws and decency, was a very thin coat in Drummond's Spite, and it hadn't been reapplied in a long time. The paint was chipping; a man serving half-flutes of champagne kept his eyes on the floor as well-dressed merchants took his offerings. The wood beneath had begun to rot; the two ladies near the window were discussing purchasing workers at auction. Rust on the boiler was left untreated: three men at the bar were having a rancorous discussion, two of whom had the neck tattoos of pirate gangs. And no one had plans to fix any of it: the third man, the one talking with the pirates, was a representative of the Merchant Marine.

"Song's almost over," Leslie whispered in her ear. He had a handkerchief in his left hand, and Anita hadn't noticed how warm his hand was until it left her waist. Discreetly, with his arm pressed against his chest, he dabbed at her eyes. "As distasteful as I find the ambiance, the musicians put on a good waltz. They knew to slow a little when we started, and picked up the tempo when you got more comfortable. Remind me to get their names before we burn this place down."

Anita chuckled, and raised her hand to wipe her tears. Leslie, however, blocked her hand before it could reach her face. "Let me. The makeup Mercy put on your face can make a bloody awful mess if you're not careful."

Anita closed her eyes. The big man, not for the first time, surprised her with how gentle he could be. She barely felt Leslie's handkerchief as he dabbed it beside her eye, and then gently caressed the skin below.

"There. That should keep the makeup from running," Leslie said as he tucked his handkerchief away. "Now, I'm gong to spin you around, would you mind looking at the big door in the back, close to the bar? I think that's where you'll need to go."

The music was definitely reaching an ending, the band building for a long note to ease them from the dance to a pause. Leslie spun Anita around with that same absurd ease he had lifted her with earlier, and held her in the air by a single arm, just near her shoulder. The motion would have hurt back at Volante or another one of the great isles, but at the weak pull of Drummond's Spite, she felt like she was swinging on a sail line like Mercy sometimes did on the ship. She spun around once, twice, her dress and her hair trailing behind her like a ship's colours.

As Anita spun, she stole a glance at the large wooden doors Leslie had pointed out. A trio of men loitered near it, all three men with their backs to the door, and all three men armed. "The door has guards. That's promising," she said as Leslie guided her back to the floor.

The music faded, and the crowds at the edge of the dance floor broke into applause. Leslie took her hand in his, and gave a courtly bow, his other hand sweeping to the side as he tilted his head almost to his waist. Anita blushed, and tried something she thought might look like a curtsy.

She gave up trying for an elegant gesture, hugged Leslie instead, and waved at some of the younger guests. "We really should do this more often, Mister Madrigan," Anita said.

Leslie stepped behind her, leaned over, and put his head close to her right ear. "I would like that," Leslie whispered. A confession and promise given to her and her alone. Anita shivered, though she wasn't cold.

"Bravo, my new friends," the fat man they had met earlier said as he sauntered across the hall. He clapped his hands as he walked, his smile just a little too large to be wholly genuine. "Mister Madrigan, if anyone doubted you came from the court of Calmoori, that's surely been put to rest."

"Your musician troupe is excellent," Leslie remarked. "I do hope you're paying them what they're worth. It would reflect poorly on your charter house if they were lured away by the ability to feed themselves."

For a moment — a precious, beautiful moment — the fat man gaped, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, looking as if Leslie had just slapped him. But the man schooled his features quickly, and extended his hand. "I'll pass on your compliments. It will mean more, knowing a refined ear appreciated their work. Tiberius Linderfield, I'm the proprietor of this branch of Volante's Merchant Charter."

They shook hands, and Anita wondered if she shouldn't have swiped a bottle of the captain's rubbing alcohol, the stuff he applies to his hands and tools before fishing a bullet out of someone.

"Will there be more dancing?" Anita asked, joining the moment by clapping her hands together and pointing at the band. "Too much business sours a day, after all."

"Oh of course," Tiberius said, giving her a fawning smile and a gaze that didn't quite manage to meet her eyes. "Though this might be a good time to show you our quality as merchants. A trader who can't stock a decent vintage isn't worth doing business with, after all. We have a crate of Aventillian red, direct from from the black fields of Tarth.

Aventila. Just hearing it made Anita flinch. Aventila was one of the great isles, and one of the great nations. Perhaps the single largest power in the skies, Aventila were also the only great nation that openly embraced slavery. There were many who feared that was a correlation, and that the other nations might imitate it.

"Isn't there a trade embargo with Aventila?" Leslie asked. "As I recall, it's one of the few things Volante and Olencia can agree on."

"Embargoes are good for the middle man," Tiberius said smoothly. "You get to buy low and sell high."

"I imagine the navy wouldn't share your mercantile spirit," Leslie mused.

There was a pause, which threatened to grow uncomfortable. Anita smiled, and rested her arm on Leslie's. "Which, as you pointed out, helps to make sure you can buy it cheap, and sell it for a fortune," she added, with a smile as vapid as she could hope to manage.

It seemed to be enough. "Exactly right. Sometimes, to make our good fortune, we have to take bold steps," Tiberius said, as he ushered them over to the bar. He rapped his knuckles on the counter to get the server's attention, and gestured forcefully to the nearby shelf. "Three glasses of the Aventilian red. And you're paying for anything you spill."

Tiberius' warning did nothing to steady the bartender's hands, which were shaking as the poor man took a bottle down by the neck and set it on the counter. It took a few tries for him to uncork the wine, but he managed to serve three glasses without raising his boss' ire.

Leslie took a glass and raised it. Anita could see he was scrutinizing it; his brow was furrowed and his mouth was scrunched a little the way it was when he mused over his cooking. But Tiberius took the gesture differently, and asked, "what are we toasting?"

Anita stole a glance at the large door beside the bar. As she looked, a well-dressed woman with glasses, a book overflowing with papers, and an abacus, was ushered through by one of the three armed guards. The abacus, in particular, suggested that they might have found the path to the hidden offices.

Anita grinned, and raised her glass. "To bold steps!"

Tiberius smiled, though it looked more like a self-satisfied sneer. "Just so, bold steps!"

Anita took a sip of the wine. And while she'd admit to herself that she could barely tell wine apart from engine cleaner, she found she enjoyed the bitter, somewhat woody flavour of it.

Tiberius stood up suddenly, and clapped his hands. Loudly, to make himself heard across the room, he shouted, "Everyone, everyone! If I could have you at the centre of the room, I have a treat for you! A marvel of new engineering, a revolution in the skies, so to speak."

The officious man turned back to Anita and Leslie. "Please, finish your wine and come see this," Tiberius said, before he left.

The man had barely made it six steps, before Leslie leaned over to Anita. "Poor fool. The wine isn't from Aventila."

Anita found that revelation felt rather satisfying. And with a second sip, made the wine taste better. "How do you know that?"

"That woody taste, it's from being aged in an oak barrel. Also, the stopper on the bottle is cork, which is a bark taken off a kind of oak tree. And there are no oak trees on Aventila," Leslie explained, as he spun the wine around in his glass. "Also, any wine from the black fields is blocked with a glass stopper and wax."

"I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell Tiberius that," the bartender said.

"Were you the one who sold him that wine?," Leslie said to the bartender, spinning around in his seat. "Well, you know your trade. The only way your boss would believe that story about the black fields of Tarth is if you fed it to him."

"I've never sold a barrel of Olencian naval ration wine for so much before," the bartender admired. "I'd rather keep it that way, if I could."

"Olencian sailors drink this?" Anita asked. She jabbed Leslie in the shoulder, and held the glass up. "Think we joined the wrong navy back in the day."

"I'm beginning to feel that way," Leslie admitted, as he took another sip.

"So what's behind that door over there?" Anita asked, pointing past the bartender's shoulder. "Whatever it is, there are armed guards in front of it."

"Think my boss would rather you didn't know what was behind that door," the bartender said.

Anita leaned forward on the bar, and tried her best to imitate one of her captain's steel-hard glares. "Think your boss would rather know he was being swindled," she retorted.

The bartender paused, and deflated like a punctured balloon. His shoulders slumped, and he hung his head a little. "Fair enough. It's the accounting office. Where they keep the books they don't want reported, like what they slipped me for the bottles of wine I sold them," the bartender said.

Anita looked over at Leslie, who finished his wine and set the glass down on the bar. He looked over to the bartender, and said, "Why don't you make her a very elaborate cocktail of some kind? Something complicated enough that you have to work on it out of earshot?"

The bartender nodded. "I could fix her a 'death in the afternoon'. Might take a few minutes to find the champagne."

"Good man," Leslie said.

"What's a 'death in the afternoon'?" Anita asked.

"Three parts champagne, one part absinthe."

"Pretty sure I could clean engine parts with that."

"Like that one?" Leslie asked, and he pointed back to the dance floor.

In the middle of the room, a crew of eight people were wheeling in a towering edifice. Half as tall as the immense vaulted ceiling, the entire edifice was obscured by canvas tarp. But at the bottom, Anita could see metal tubes and what looked like a boiler.

"Ladies and Gentlemen!" Tiberius announced, twiliring about theatrically in the centre of the room. He walked around the edifice, repeating his cry until the had drawn every eye in the hall. "Ladies and Gentlemen, our humble chapter of the Merchant Charter, the Kingdom of Volante's own, would like to present to you an invention that will change the skies forever!"

"Well, he seems very happy with himself," Leslie remarked. A laugh, and the sip of wine Anita was drinking spat from her mouth like an over-pressurized valve. Anita slapped her knees to keep herself from tumbling out of her seat.

Tiberius looked at her for a moment, as if he were about to say something. But one quick glance at Leslie and he smiled just a little too widely for it to be genuine. "Indeed, something to change the balance of power between the great isles. Imagine, if you would, a device capable of lifting even the heaviest barge or warship from the ground, all the way to the free sky! No need to rely on the slow climb of a ship's lift balloon, and no more need to rely on the Monastery's helium monopoly!"

"That's quite the buildup," Anita mused aloud.

"Allow me to show you what our inventors are calling 'The Wirlwind'!" Tiberius crescendoed. The workers around the device pulled the canvas down from one side. The canvas fell over a trio of propellers, mounted on a rotary that allowed the blades to point towards the floor. Beneath the propeller was a full engine, complete with furnace and boiler, all enmeshed within a steel frame like an enormous birdcage.

"Well, that's something," Leslie said beside her.

Anita scoffed. "It's a propeller, and an engine. I'll admit, using a cone-shaped pull feed as an injector for a furnace is an interesting idea, but that machine there ain't any more complicated than a raft's engine. Might work here in Drummond's Spite, but Volante's pull will keep that thing from lifting up anything more than a dinghy."

"And that's where we will make a fortune!" Tiberius exclaimed, pointing to Anita as if she had made his point for him. "The Whirlwind is capable of lifting a dinghy, or even a raft. A few, and lifting a schooner is possible. But to lift a real warship, you would need dozens. Selling one, or just a few of them, would barely recoup the cost to design and build it. But sell hundreds, and we could make ourselves the kind of fortune we deserve!"

There was a thunderous applause that filled the room. Taking advantage of the cacophony, Anita leaned over to Leslie, and spoke into his ear. "I think we have our distraction."

"You have a plan?" Leslie asked.

"Not a plan. But I have my tools. Just get me close enough to tinker with it a little, and I'll have their thing flying through the ceiling," Anita promised. She reached into her tool pouch, and took out a wrench. "I just need two more things."

"What is it?" Leslie asked.

Anita turned around, just in time for the bartender to set a small glass, filled with a bubbling, pale-green liquid in front of her. Anita put the glass to her lips, and tipped the whole thing down her throat.

Her eyes watered, her head felt like someone had dunked it into a bath, and she wanted to cough. But she set the glass down, turned to the bartender, and pointed at her empty drink. "One more thing."