HOW TO BLOW UP TOLLINS. Conn Iggulden

comb the south of England for them, now we have the blue glasses,” his cheerful friend replied. “We’ve found forty in just a few gardens. If we get the job for Buckingham Palace, we’ll have buyers queuing down the street. We’ll make our fortune!”

      Sparkler seethed in his tube. The bearded men didn’t realise Tollins could survive being used in fireworks! They honestly thought they were going to blow them up! He was horrified and then, after a bit of thought, he was horrified again. It wouldn’t be long before the bearded men found out that Tollins could be used over and over and over again.

      The future looked dark, though to be fair, almost everything looks dark when you are wedged upside down in a cardboard tube.

       CHAPTER THREE

       THE VITAL IMPORTANCE OF SALAMI

      Sparkler survived his first trip in a Moon Rocket. He had quite a lot of time to think about his situation before his tube was lit. Stunned and deafened, he fell for a long time before landing on the roof of Buckingham Palace in London. The bearded men had impressed the king with their new fireworks and Sparkler had been launched as a result. Three more Tollins landed among the pipes and tiles of the roof and rested there with Sparkler. It took almost two months for their wings to grow back.

      By the time they were ready to fly home to Chorleywood, Sparkler had formed one important question that needed an answer. It didn’t worry the men in the factory. They were happy enough gathering up Tollins from miles around and if they even noticed some of the them were the same, it didn’t seem to trouble them. For Sparkler, though, it was important. Why were Tollin fireworks better than the normal kind?

      It was while trudging through Somerset on his way home for the third time that he noticed something different about himself.

      Tollins have dust on them. It wouldn’t be right to call it ‘fairy dust’, as fairies don’t actually have any. It’s Tollin dust. Tollins don’t think about it much, any more than you think about your eyebrows, or a moth thinks about moth dust, though that exists as well. For Tollins, it’s a light powder on their wings and skin that drifts behind them as they fly. Sparkler was the first to notice that all the dust had gone after every trip in a firework. Somehow, the bright colours and explosion used it up. It came back, thank goodness, just as their wings grew back, but Sparkler thought it had to be important. He was almost cheerful as he walked through the Somerset village of Taunton in the moonlight.

      When he reached Chorleywood at last, he gathered some of the other Tollins at an old oak tree on Chorleywood Common. In the tunnels under the station, he knew the High Tollin would again be in deep discussion with his council, so deep it would be difficult to wake them for dinner. Sparkler knew they’d never listen to him, so he gathered the ones he knew and trusted. Some had been taken for the latest batch of fireworks. His friend Grunion was still in a tube and his parents were somewhere over Margate, if Sparkler had read the factory supply lists correctly. That little book with its pictures of apples and bees had come in handy there. So had the children’s dictionary he had borrowed the previous year. It made his brain fizz to look through the pages, like a… well, like a firework, with ears.

      When the Tollins were all settled, Sparkler took a deep breath.

      “It’s the dust,” he told them, making himself comfortable on a fairy cushion. It squeaked a bit, but he ignored it. “Whatever it is, it burns off when they light the tubes. That’s what makes the colours and that’s why Tollin fireworks are so good.”

      The other Tollins shuffled and stared at each other, then back at him. They were a bedraggled bunch compared to the happy Tollins he had known before the factory came. In the end, it fell to an old Tollin named Briar to speak for all of them. Briar had refused to call himself by one of the new names. His first experience of the factory had been on a Catherine wheel and ‘Catherine’ didn’t suit him, not even a little bit. Spinning round at high speed had not been enjoyable at all. In fact, he hadn’t walked in a straight line since that day.

      “You could be right, lad. But it doesn’t help us, does it?”

      Sparkler blinked at the old Tollin.

      “Of course it does! If we can find out what the dust is, we can show the bearded men! They wouldn’t have to use us if they could get the dust somewhere else, would they?”

      The crowd perked up at this news, but Sparkler went on.

      “Even if we can’t make it, they could just scrape it off! We’d never have to travel in a rocket again!”

      They cheered that idea, but then Briar cleared his throat like a dog enjoying a boiled sweet.

      “Have you forgotten the First Law, old son? We do not speak to humans. It leads to trouble and, sometimes, gravity.”

      Sparkler nodded slowly.

      “I haven’t forgotten, Briar, but this is an emergency. I’ll be the one to break the law. If it means trouble later, it’ll fall on my head alone.”