The Eye of Zoltar

Colin’s fall

And so it was. Colin, obviously finished with his supermarket opening, had dropped in to see how things were going and had been mistaken, we supposed, for a trespassing aircraft. We could do little but watch anxiously as Colin attempted to turn around and head back the way he had come. Unluckily, he was disoriented by the smoke, noise and hot shrapnel, and wandered farther into the Cambrian Empire’s airspace. Eventually there was a black puff of smoke, and Colin rolled on to his back and began to fall towards the earth. We could see that one wing was tattered and frayed where the skin covering had been torn, and the other beat the air ferociously in a vain attempt to control his descent.

I looked at Perkins; his index fingers were already pointing at the Dragon. He thought quickly and mumbled a few words under his breath.

‘Looking good,’ I said. The Dragon had stopped struggling as Perkins transformed him into something else. I then noticed a green glint as the sun caught the figure, and I realised that the Dragon had not changed into anything usefully energy-absorbing, but glass. The impact upon hitting the ground would be catastrophic.

‘Try again,’ I said, as quietly and casually as I could, given the circumstances.

Perkins did try again, and the Dragon was immediately no longer glass, but an ornate decorative Dragon carved from marble. The resultant impact with the earth would have the same fatal effect, and possibly leave a large hole, too.

‘Okay, okay, I’ve got it,’ said Perkins, and let fly again.

Colin was now less than a thousand feet from the earth and still whirling about as the air rushed past his now rigid wings. Gravity, never a close friend to Dragons, would doubtless raise the historical score to Dragons: nil, Gravity: sixty-three.

Perkins tried again and Colin changed to bronze, then a shiny metallic lucky Chinese Dragon with a waving front leg, then to alabaster. All of these feats, while powerful and complex in themselves, really helped us not one jot, and as Colin passed the three-hundred-foot mark and was changed by Perkins into a delicate ice sculpture, I did the last thing available to me. I punched Perkins hard on the arm. It was a risky undertaking and could have gone either way – to him getting the spell correct, or failing utterly.

‘What the—?’

‘Get it together,’ I snapped, ‘or you and me are done.’

Actually, him and me were not yet an item so we couldn’t be done, but I had to think that it might be something he valued, and give him an emotional boost to get the spell right. With only two hundred feet and a second or two to a nasty, shattered end, Perkins tried again and Colin changed abruptly to a dark matt-black substance.

I held my breath.

Colin hit the road with what I can only describe as probably the loudest, deepest and most dense-sounding thud I had ever heard. He narrowly missed two backpackers and a car as he momentarily spread out across the road to a flat disc about six inches thick. In an instant the rubber molecules that now made up his body sprang back into shape and Colin was catapulted high into the air. So high in fact, that the anti-aircraft guns opened up again, but this time with less accuracy, and none of the shell bursts came close. Pretty soon Colin was on his way back down but this time he landed five hundred yards or so farther away, and a second later was catapulted back into the air. We watched with growing despondency as Rubber Colin bounced off into the distance until he vanished below a low hill to the north.

‘Blast,’ said Perkins, lowering his now steaming finger in case anyone noticed he was responsible. They hadn’t, and Perkins suddenly looked tired and sat on our luggage, head in hands.

‘You okay?’ I asked.

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘I’ve not spelled that strongly before. Do I look okay?’

He looked tired and drained and somehow … different. More world-weary. I told him he probably needed an early night and he nodded in agreement.

‘Was that Colin?’ asked the Princess, walking back toward us.

I told her it was but to keep it under her hat. Magic was strictly forbidden in the Empire, and Perkins certainly didn’t want to be outed as a sorcerer.

‘How far do you think he went?’ she asked, staring at the horizon.

Perkins looked at his watch.

‘He’ll be bouncing for the next ten minutes or so. Best guess – thirty or forty miles.’

‘How much wizidrical energy to change him back?’ I asked.

‘Bucketloads if you want it done immediately,’ replied Perkins thoughtfully, ‘but the spell will wear off on its own within a few days. Either way, he’s not flying out of here on his own – not with a wing like that.’

‘But he’s safe as a rubber dragon until he turns back?’

‘Sure – so long as no one tries to make car tyres or doorstops or gumboots out of him. But it’s not all bad,’ he added. ‘At least he’ll be waterproof if it rains.’

I sighed. This was a bad start to our search. I pulled my compass out of my bag and took a bearing on the hill behind which Colin had bounced, then drew a line on my map. It was, luckily enough, pretty much in the same direction we were to travel. If our calculations were correct, Colin would be running out of bounce not far from Llangurig.

‘They had run out of armoured cars,’ said the Princess ‘so I persuaded them to upgrade us to a military half-track at the same rate.’

She looked at Perkins, who was still sitting, head in hands.

‘Do you think we should upgrade this to a quest?’ she asked.

‘It is not a quest,’ I said emphatically. ‘If it was we’d need to register with the International Questing Federation, adhere to their “Code of Conduct” and pay them two thousand moolah into the bargain.’

This was true. The Questing Federation were powerful, and would insist on a minimum staffing requirement: at least one strong-and-silent warrior, a sage-like old man, and either a giant or a dwarf – and all of them cost bundles, not just in salary but in hotel bills too. To go on a quest these days you needed serious financial backing.

‘No,’ I said more emphatically, ‘this is a search, plain and simple.’

‘Jenny?’ said Perkins, still with his eyes closed.

‘Yes?’

‘Why were they shooting at Colin? At barely the size of a pony and with fiery breath no more powerful than a blowlamp, he’s not exactly dangerous.’

A voice chirped up behind us.

‘They shot him down because all aerial traffic in the Cambrian Empire is banned.’

I turned to see who was speaking, and that was when we first met Addie Powell.