The figures stalking up Horsemarket weren’t just seeming to get bigger as they neared the erstwhile town square. They were genuinely getting bigger. What had started at the bottom of the hill as men of roughly normal height, by halfway-up had been transformed to two colossi, twenty feet or more in stature and continuing to grow as they came closer. By the time they strode out into the immense arena of the Mayorhold, they were each at least as large as the twelve-storey NEWLIFE flats that Michael had been so impressed by when he and the Dead Dead Gang had made their eerie detour through the ghost-seam into nothing-five or nothing-six. In Michael’s judgement, standing on the balcony with all the other gawping ghosts, he was approximately level with the towering builders’ abdomens and had to crane his neck back and look up to see their sphinx-sized faces.
One of them was the same Master Builder that he’d seen talking to shuffling Sam O’Day above the Attics of the Breath, the one with white hair, which, on this scaled-up representation looked quite like the whiteness of a mountain peak above the snowline. The wide ocean-liner planes of the unearthly sculpted face rose up away from Michael, who found himself fascinated by the rippling play of the reflected light trapped in the shadows of the chin’s vast underside. The white-haired builder paced around the spacious confines of the unpacked Mayorhold with his blue-tipped rod gripped in one monstrous marble fist, big as a bungalow. His naked feet, a dizzying distance down beneath the children’s first floor balcony, appeared to walk upon the writhing coral carpet that was what the mortal world looked like seen from Upstairs. The angle waded through the ghost-seam, with its dirty grey tideline seeming to lap about his redwood thighs, and reared up to the floating mathematics of the sapphire firmament above, spanning three realms of being as he circled the enormous hushed enclosure, fuse-fire crawling in his pale, millwheel-sized eyes.
The other builder was a different matter. Not that he was any the less awesome or imposing, simply that he had a very different atmosphere attaching to his monumental semblance. The eye-watering glare of his apparel seemed to only reinforce the air of dark there was about him, from his close-cropped hair — jet black where his opponents was both long and fair — to his green eyes set deep within their sooty sockets. High above the balcony he turned the shadowy cathedral mass that was his head and curled lips long as barges into a blood-curdling snarl of fury and resentment, baring teeth like city gates of polished ivory, glowering poisonously at the other white leviathan, shifting his grip upon the slim and street-length wooden wand he held in hands that could have cupped a village. Stamping round the yawning stage that was an utter realisation of the Mayorhold, every footfall sending shudders through the nearby Mansoul residences that the ragged ghosts assembled on their balconies could feel, two of the four great pivots of the cosmos spiralled fatefully towards each other, as unhurried and inevitable as colliding glaciers.
The tension in the stadium-like corral was like tiptoeing over creaking glass: a dreadful apprehensive hush as several hundred numinous spectators on the balconies held breath that they no longer truly had. Even a deathly silence, Michael noticed, had an echo in the outlandish acoustics of the Second Borough, where even a purely nervous pressure was enough to make your ears pop. Toes curled up and ghost-teeth grinding anxiously, the toddler was just wondering if fainting might be a way out of this unbearably fraught situation when the dam broke, and all of the witnesses like Michael who’d been hoping only moments earlier that it would do just that found themselves desperately wishing that it hadn’t.
The dark Master Builder suddenly broke from his wary circling to rush across the three-tiered battleground, the twisting crystals of the mortal bedrock shivering beneath his tread and the grey blanket of the ghost-seam warping and distorting like a murky fluid around the gargantuan form splashing through it. Michael could see colourless ghost-busses bending in the middle and the hapless spectres still down in the half-world washed against the phantom Mayorhold’s walls in bath-scum ripples by the churning passage of the angry craftsman. From a throat deep as a railway tunnel came a vengeful howl that sounded like wind keening through dead cities. Furnace doors swung open in the crew-cut giant’s eyes as he brought up his staff with both hands clasped around its base, moving the pallid shaft so quickly that its whiteness broke apart into component colours and an arcing rainbow smear was left behind as it sliced through the tingling air.
His white-haired adversary, just in time, brought up his own azure-tipped wand to block the lethal blow, held with a hand towards each end as an unyielding bar.
The two rods smashed together with the sound of a whole continent snapping in two, and in that moment the blue china bowl of Mansoul’s sky turned an impenetrable black from rim to rim. Out from the point of impact, jagged threads of lightning crazed the heavens with a spider-web of trickling fire, cracking the sudden darkness to a million spiky fragments. The report of the explosion rumbled off into the over-world’s unfathomable distances and it began to pour with something that appeared to be a very complicated form of rain. Each droplet was a geometric lattice, like a snowflake, but in three dimensions so that they resembled silver balls with intricately carven filigree that you could peer through to the empty space inside; these tiny structures somehow built from liquid water rather than from ice. As each bead splashed against the rail or boardwalk it broke into half a dozen even smaller perfect copies of itself, rebounding up into the suddenly dark air. Michael found himself wondering briefly if this was what water really looked like, with the type he was familiar with from Downstairs in the mortal realm being an incomplete perception of an actually four-sided substance. Then the sheer force of the frightening downpour drove all such considerations from his mind as, with the district’s other phantom residents, he inched back from the railing, trying to get beneath the meagre shelter offered by the balconies above.
Against a new black sky, the warring Master Builders blazed like two Armada beacons. The white-haired one, having dropped to one knee while he staved off his opponent’s blow, now sprang up with a speed borne of his greater leverage and, with his staff held only in one hand now, drove the other fist up from below into the darker angle’s face. There was a bubbling spray of what should have been blood but in the current circumstances turned out to be molten gold, the costly gore steaming and hissing, tempered by the pounding wonder-rain to rattle down upon the lower levels of reality as smoking ingots, precious misshapes.
An entire exchequer dripping from his ruined nose, the injured Master Builder reeled back swearing in his own unravelled language. Michael somehow knew that with each curse, somewhere across the world a vineyard failed, a school was closed, a struggling artist gave up in despair. With an afraid, sick feeling mounting in the memory of his heart, he knew this wasn’t just a fight. This was all that was right or true about the universe, attempting to destroy itself.
The shaven-headed builder lashed out blindly with his rod in a one-handed scything sweep which, by sheer luck, hit his opponent in the mouth. Lip cut and gushing bullion, his white-haired antagonist gave an ear-splitting bellow, shattering every window in the higher town square. Lightning forked again across the black dome up above them, and the monsoon of unfolded rain redoubled in its onslaught. Both the giants were bleeding treasure now, starting to miss their footing on the crystalline entanglements of the material world beneath them, where the jewel-web and its crawling coloured lights were lost beneath a slick of pelting hyper-water.
Michael realised with a start that when he’d seen the white-haired builder earlier, up in the Attics of the Breath, the Master Angle had been nursing wounds and on his way back from the fight that Michael and the other members of the Dead Dead Gang were watching now. Since on that first occasion Michael had only just died, did that mean that right now down in the mortal world his mum Doreen was carefully unwrapping the red cherry-menthol cough-sweet from its small waxed-paper square with “Tunes Tunes Tunes” all over it? As the snow-peaked colossus cast his turquoise-pointed wand aside and threw himself across the sizzling rain-drenched Mayorhold at his enemy, was the pink lozenge at that very moment sliding into Michael’s dangerously restricted mortal windpipe in the sunny yard of 17, St. Andrew’s Road, down there in the First Borough? Worse still, somewhere in himself the infant knew that this divine affray and his own deadly choking fit, both terrible events in their own way, were intimately linked and were in some unfathomable fashion causing one another to occur.