Chimera Book One

Chapter Thirteen

Kyp’s eyes snapped open.  He was flat on his back, his body listing from side to side.  He was being carried on some kind of stretcher through a narrow canyon of crumpled, colour-splashed paint kettles.

As Kyp sat up a gruff voice complained, ‘Do stop fidgeting.  You’re putting me off my stride.’

‘We have to go back.  We have to go back, we -.’

Kyp stopped, as a number of details impressed themselves upon him.  His transport wasn’t a stretcher, but a large brown sofa.   It resembled a kind of buffalo – a soffalo! - and he was on the creature’s soft, brown back.

Bewildered, Kyp tried to slow the spin of his thoughts.

Jamie.

Where was Jamie?

Kyp looked over his shoulder to find the other boy sitting astride another former sofa. 

‘Are you all right?’

Nodding, Jamie said, ‘Where are they taking us?’

Kyp turned back and wriggled his way towards the head of the soffalo.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’m not supposed to talk to you,’ it replied.

‘My friend is in terrible trouble.  He was attacked on the mountain. We have to go back!’

‘Then it’s already too late.  The concrete menagerie leaves no one alive. Your friend is dead.’

Kyp’s heart went cold.  He opened his mouth but no words would come.   Jamie was shouting suddenly, and then Kyp saw it too, a great silver cloud before them that whirled in quick, sparkling circles.  The cloud raced towards them. A whirring filled the air.  As the cloud engulfed him, Kyp closed his eyes and curled into a protective ball.  He felt the pricking of sharp little claws and things tangling with his hair.  He began to swat at the air with his hands.

‘Oh, do stop fussing,’ said the soffalo. ‘They won’t harm you.’

Kyp opened his eyes to find the air thronging with thousands of tiny, silver birds.  They encircled his head taking turns to snip at his fringe with their beaks and cut away loose threads hanging from the soffalo’s flank.  Some hopped along the canyon floor, kicking up dust in puffs and weaving daringly between the heavy tread of the soffalo.

Jamie, who was similarly covered in a bustling canopy of the little birds, cried, ‘What are they?’

‘Vanity-sparrows,’ answered the soffalo.

‘But what are they?’

The soffalo grunted.

Kyp better understood the other boy’s question.  He could have told Jamie how the multitude of silver birds had started life as pairs of scissors, and how an object became a halfefact, and how a halfefact became a metamorph.  Even so, the whole idea seemed impossible and Kyp had to keep from crying; this strange world seemed too strange without Atticus Weft.

At that moment, the vanity-sparrows took fright, startled into the air by the arrival of a gang of menacing-looking metamorphs.  With their square shoulders and short, squat legs they resembled a rugby scrum of leather armchairs, but with their low-slung heads and massive forearms, they moved like apes. 

‘Arrest them!’ the largest of them commanded.

The two boys were dragged from the soffalos and frog-marched onto the approach road to a city that glittered with soaring shelf-like structures comprised of struts, platforms and joists.  Above it, a dense traffic of creatures discoloured the sky.  Vast flocks of vanity sparrows wheeled and dived and flashed like lightening.  Kyp and Jamie were given no time to take in the view and their protests went ignored.