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The Spotted Custard sank as Percy activated the anti-puffer Rue’s sto on a large wave They slid through the Charybdis currents easily this tied the airship ard away froain, professor," ordered Rue

Down they bobbed a second time And a third And a fourth in quick succession This was followed by a buffeting spin through another set of fiercer Charybdis currents Then they were blessedly out The aether h a star-filled sky Rue wondered, not for the first time, what the aetherosphere looked like from above And what, in fact, the layer above the aetherosphere was made of – was it even breathable? She was not alone in this curiosity – aether scientists discussed the outersphere as if it were a desirable undiscovered country, and were always concocting neays to go higher So far, however, no one had h

Percy cranked up the propeller, and The Spotted Custard farted excitedly Slowly, they swung around to face their original direction of travel, and before the section of the Maltese Tower, the beacon rising above into the aetherosphere

Rue scurried to the front rail of the forecastle, looking out over the bowsprit at the Sixth Pinnacle of the Modern Age

The Maltese Tower, one of the Eight Wonders of the British Eht hope It looked like nothing soequipment – a massive circular oven pot with peepholes and s andith their handles in These spatulas ibles, ornithopers, and other airships, fresh into port,ropes out So on helium, water, or coal The tiny for the spatulas like ants along cake servers The dock of the Maltese Tower resembled a shipyard, only miles up in the air Not, of course, that Lady Prudence should have any idea what a shipyard looked like

Rue wasn’t iht Wonders of the British E port, but its bottom half

For when one looked down, it was as if the Maltese Tower kept going for ever, braced and supported by scaffolding so colossal it required most of the island of Malta as its base This part also looked like an endless stack of kitchen utensils It was held up not by its own structure, but by hot-air balloons staged all along in a random pattern, balloons that were moved by the winds so that the whole toayed one way and then the other under the influence of various breezes Like some underwater sea worm meets juht Rue

The Maltese Tower seemed to have been built with any available material: fabric and net, wood and steel, a massive bicycle here, bits of boat there, very se Rue knew people lived and worked up and down the tower, an entire culture sustained by aetheric travel, but she was hard-pressed to think it wondrous

Prim came to stand next to her "Gracious me! It is hideous, isn’t it?"

"Oh, I don’t know" Rue was disposed to be optiht be called attractively biological See those parts, dangling They are like seed pods"

"Presunored her friend’s lack of romantic vision "The balloons and air tanks there are like leaves stretching upward"

"I don’t follow"