Over on the supernal town square’s far side now, a mile or two away, the paler of the combatants crashed into his more saturnine foe and the pair of them went over like collapsing skyscrapers. The phosphorescent robes billowing all about them as they fell must have glanced up against the balconies of the ennobled Co-op Branch 19 exactly opposite, since its wood railings burst immediately into flames, these luckily being extinguished by the convoluted and torrential rain almost immediately.
It seemed to Michael, watching from between his parted fingers, that the bloody golden free-for-all occurring up here in the heights of Mansoul must be having repercussive echoes in the stacked-up planes below. Indeed, down in the pearly film of gelatine that was the ghost-seam he could see fights breaking out in sympathy amongst the surly wraiths who were the half-world’s occupants. Comparatively minuscule, their monochrome forms paired up into tiny clots of vigorous animosity around the massive warring planetoids that were the Master Builders, intertwined and pummelling each other at the Mayorhold’s centre, rolling blood-stained in the hopping, spitting puddles wide as boating lakes. He saw two lady apparitions laying into one another outside the grey ghost of the Green Dragon at the foot of Bearward Street, opening brutal fans of after-image limbs with every swinging punch or kick. One of the brawlers was a squat tank of a woman with an eyelid hanging off, the other smaller and already bleeding worryingly from one ear yet armed with a phantasmal broken bottle that she wielded with both relish and efficiency. Their multiple arms whirling like two murderous windmills, the ghost-women tilted at each other as though they were re-enacting some unsettled feud from when the pair of them were living, blow for vicious blow. Elsewhere in the smoky domain of the rough sleepers, outside the old public toilets at the bottom end of Silver Street, the spirits of two Romany or Jewish market traders were engaged in gleefully kicking the stuffing from the man in a black shirt that they’d got on the floor between them. Everywhere about the ashen shade of the enclosure, abject disembodied souls used strangleholds and tried to gouge each other’s eyes, joyously joining in with the ethereal hostility of the titanic Master Angles as they wrestled there amidst the ghost-spite and the hammering deluge.
If Michael focussed on the layer underneath the ghost-seam, where the twining spark-lit fronds of coral that were living people knitted to a glittering foundation for the terraces above, then even here the heavenly aggression that cascaded down from the superior worlds was having its effect. He fancied that in some of the livelier areas of the human pattern, he was looking at the stationary vectors of a mortal punch-up where the green and blue and red glass millipedes seemed more than usually contorted and wound into knots that were fantastic and intractable. One such arrangement, a confused and looping mess of coloured filaments, put him in mind of the three living schoolboys that they’d seen outside the sweetshop next to Trasler’s newsagent’s in the ghost-seam. Michael wondered if the lads had somehow managed to fall out over dividing up their gobstoppers and had now come to blows down in the mortal shopping-square, unconsciously responding to the unseen skirmish going on above them. Staring in mute dread at the enormous builders as they rolled together in the rain, engrossed in their expensive bloodshed, Michael didn’t doubt that there were ants and microbes battling at the mortal school-kids’ feet, nor that in the incomprehensible geometries that drifted far above Mansoul there might be abstract formulae at war, fractiously trying to disprove each other. It was like a tower of wrath and violence with the raging builders at its centre, reaching from the very bottom of existence to the unimaginable top, and it was all because of him. He was the reason this was happening, him and his cough-sweet.
As if underscoring this unnerving fact, the white-haired builder was now trying to regain his feet, crouched over in the unrelenting downpour close to the west wall of the enclosure, where the Works was situated. As the Master Angle strived to pull himself up from the muck and wet there came a terrifying instant when one of his huge hands settled on the wooden balustrade, four marble fingers thick as Doric columns clenching suddenly on the pitch-painted railing so that all the ghost-spectators gathered there jumped back and screamed, the adult spectres just as loudly as the phantom kids. The motley audience shrank against the balcony’s rear wall and trembled as the giant figure, painfully and slowly, hauled itself erect. As though a monstrous candle had been snuffed, a gasp that split into a thousand skittering echoes went up from the cowering mob as first a forest of white curls and then the stunning face, wide as a circus tent, were dragged up into view over the handrail like a pale and angry sun inching above a flat and black horizon. As the Cyclopean visage drew level with the crowded landing, the ferocious battering that it had taken was horrifically apparent. The carved ship’s-prow of his chin was gilded with the angle’s priceless blood, spilled from a split lip that had now scabbed over with doubloons and ducats. One of the vast eyes was swollen shut with a bruise-sheen of shimmering opal pigments starting to erupt in the abraded alabaster flesh. The other, full of weariness and urgent import, fixed its endless stare for several paralysing seconds upon Michael Warren. Nothing was conveyed by that long glance save powerful recognition, but if Michael had still had a bladder he would have released it there and then. I know about you, Michael Warren. I know all about you and your cherry-menthol Tune.
Breaking the gaze and straightening up so that his head and shoulders were once more high overhead above the parapet, the Master Builder wheeled round in a showering swish of soaked and heavy robes, striding as if with renewed purpose to the far side of the Mayorhold where his crop-skulled fellow combatant was on his knees in the congealed arterial gold, punch-drunk and still attempting to stand up. The shining ogre leaned upon his polished staff, one huge paw fumbling for purchase on the cream and emerald ledges of Co-op Branch 19, where the ghostly onlookers scattered in squealing terror.
Rushing upon his dazed, downed adversary from behind, the white-crowned builder voiced a terrible world-ending roar and seized his groggy former comrade by the gown’s damp shoulders. In a petrifying show of strength that seemed to violate every law of mass and motion that existed, the dark builder was whipped up into the air as weightless as a scarecrow. His limp form described a rapid, blurring semi-circular trajectory before he was slammed down agonisingly onto his back, the impact juddering through the foundations of Mansoul. So swiftly had the move been executed that its draft could be felt on the balcony outside the Works, where mangy spirits who had sidled back towards the balustrade once the pale Master Builder had removed his hand were now blown back against the landing’s rear wall, their red Roman cloaks and Saxon furs and shiny-kneed de-mob suits flapping frantically. Phyll Painter looked round at the other children, shouting to be heard above the moaning of the unexpected wind.