The Maltese Tower, one of the Eight Wonders of the British Empire, was as impressive as one might hope. It looked like nothing so much as an immense piece of elaborate cooking equipment – a massive circular oven pot with peepholes and windows and multiple spatulas sticking up and out, only facing the wrong way with their handles in. These spatulas made up the docking ports, a few already boasted dirigibles, ornithopers, and other airships, fresh into port, mooring ropes out. Some were under maintenance, while others were taking on helium, water, or coal. The tiny forms of dock workers scampered along 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 impressed because what made the Maltese Tower one of the Eight Wonders of the British Empire wasn’t its beacon, nor its docking 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 tower swayed one way and then the other under the influence of various breezes. Like some underwater sea worm meets jumble sale.

It must be terribly troublesome in a storm, thought 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 small houses, the occasional train carriage. 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 optimistic. “If one squints, it might be called attractively biological. See those parts, dangling. They are like seed pods.”

“Presumably they’re actually habitations and workshops.”

Rue ignored her friend’s lack of romantic vision. “The balloons and air tanks there are like leaves stretching upward.”

“I don’t follow.”

“No, you never do.” Rue was resigned. Primrose was a creature of practical elegance and the Maltese Tower was neither.