FOURTEEN

Colin’s Fall

And so it was. Colin, obviously finished with his supermarket opening, had flown over the border to join us and had been mistaken, we supposed, for a trespassing aircraft. We could do little but watch anxiously as Colin attempted to turn and head back the way he had come. Disoriented by the smoke, noise, and hot shrapnel, he wandered farther into the Cambrian Empire’s airspace.

Eventually there was a puff of black smoke, and Colin rolled onto his back and began to fall toward the earth. We could see that one wing was tattered and frayed, 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 as he mumbled a few words under his breath.

“Looking good,” I said. Colin had stopped struggling as Perkins transformed him—sadly, not into anything usefully energy absorbing, but glass. The impact upon hitting the ground would be catastrophic.

“Try again,” I said, as quietly and as relaxed as I could.

Perkins did try again, and suddenly Colin became an ornate decorative dragon carved from marble. The impact 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 less than a thousand feet from the ground and still whirling as the air rushed past his now-rigid wings. Gravity, never a close friend of dragons, would surely raise the historical score to dragons: nil, gravity: sixty-three.

Perkins tried again. Colin changed to bronze, then to alabaster, then became a shiny metallic lucky Chinese dragon with a waving front leg. All of these feats, while powerful and complex in themselves, helped us not one bit. As Colin passed the three-hundred-foot mark and was changed by Perkins into a delicate ice sculpture, I took the last resort. I punched Perkins hard on the arm with the Helping Hand^™. It was a risky undertaking and could have gone either way: he could get the spell right or fail utterly.

“What the—?”

“Get it together,” I snapped, “or we’re done.”

Actually, Perkins and I were not yet really a couple, but I had to think that the possibility might be something he valued in order to give him an emotional surge and get the spell right. With only two hundred feet and a few seconds until a nasty, shattered end, Perkins tried again and Colin changed abruptly to a dark matte black substance.

I held my breath.

Colin hit the road with the loudest, deepest, and densest-sounding thud I had ever heard. He narrowly missed two backpackers and a car as he quickly spread out into a flat disc about six inches thick. In an instant the elasticity in the rubber molecules that now made up his body sprang back into shape and Colin was catapulted high into the air. He went so high that the anti-aircraft guns opened up again, but this time none of the shell bursts came close. Colin was soon on his way back down, this time five hundred yards or so farther away, and a second later catapulted back up. We watched with growing dismay as Rubber Colin bounced off into the distance and vanished behind a low hill to the north.

“Blast,” said Perkins, lowering his now-steaming fingers. Magic was strictly forbidden in the empire, but fortunately no one seemed to have noticed that he was responsible. 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 drained and somehow . . . different. More world-weary. I told him he probably needed an early night, and he nodded in agreement.

“How far do you think he went?” I stared 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 would it take to change him back?”

“Bucketloads if you want it done immediately,” replied Perkins thoughtfully, “but the spell will wear off on its own within a week or two. 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—as long as no one tries to make car tires or doorstops or rain boots 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 had to travel. If our calculations were correct, Colin would run out of bounce not far from Llangurig.

The princess returned five minutes later. “The rental car agency had run out of armored cars,” she said, “so I persuaded them to upgrade us to a military half-track at the same rate. I can’t drive, so they’ll deliver it to us here.” She looked at Perkins, who was still sitting with head in hands. “Problems?”

I told her about Rubber Colin.

“Ah,” she said. “I wondered what that was that bounced past. Do you think we should upgrade this to a quest, what with searching for rubber dragons as well as the Eye and Pirate Wolff and stuff?”

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

The Questing Federation was powerful and would insist on a minimum staffing requirement: at least one strong-and-silent warrior, a sagelike old man, and quite possibly a giant and a dwarf, too. All of them would cost bundles, not just in salary but hotel bills. A quest these days needed serious financial backing.

“No,” I said even 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 blow lamp, he’s not exactly dangerous.”

A voice chirped 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 met Addie Powell.