Tom had an idea.

There was no time to explain to Hester what he was about to do. He didn’t think she would approve anyway, since he had borrowed this manoeuvre from Valentine; from an episode in Adventures of a Practical Historian, one of those books he had thrilled to back in his apprentice days, before he found out what real adventures were like. Spewing gas from her dorsal vents the Jenny dropped into the path of the oncoming city and went powering forward on a collision course. The voice on the radio rose to a sudden scream, and Hester and Pennyroyal screamed too as Tom steered the ship low over the rusty factories on the brim of the middle tier and drove her between two enormous supporting pillars into the shadow of the tier above. Behind him, two of the Fox Spirits pulled up short, but the leader was bolder, and followed him into the heart of the city.

This was Tom’s first visit to Novaya-Nizhni, and it was rather a fleeting one. From what he could see, the city was laid out in much the same way as poor old London, with broad streets radiating out from the centre of each tier. Along one of these the Jenny Haniver raced at lamp-post height, while shocked faces gaped down at her from upper windows and pedestrians scattered for cover on the pavements. Near the tier’s hub loomed a thicket of support-pillars and elevator shafts, a slalom-course through which the little airship slipped with inches to spare, grazing her envelope and scraping paint from her steering vanes. The pursuing Fox Spirit was not so lucky. Neither Tom nor Hester saw quite what happened, but they heard the rending crash even over the roar of the Jenny ’s engines, and the periscope showed them the wreckage crumpling towards the deck, the gondola swinging drunkenly from an overhead tramway.