The Eye of Zoltar by Jasper Fforde

hand. Before I could even begin to gauge from where the explosion had come, there was another crack, then another, and within a short time the air was filled with a sound like constant rolling thunder, so loud and heavy as to be almost directionless. I looked up and noticed that the anti-aircraft guns less than a hundred yards away were firing into the sky. I had once been on the receiving end of anti-aircraft fire while attempting to escape on a flying carpet, and I can tell you that it is
most
unpleasant. I looked up to see what they were shooting at, and my heart froze as a distinctive silhouette jinked and twisted as the anti-aircraft shells exploded all around it.
    ‘Oh dear,’ said Perkins, ‘that’s Colin.’

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