My shirt comes off my shoulders in a single motion, flowing towards the nearest maggot like a whip. The sicarius shrieks, but I am already upon it, hands sliding around face and head, gripping nightmare jaws and twisting and turning so that we stagger together in a wild children’s dance of follow-me: two steps this way and three steps that, and back and up and down. When I send him off, the creature falls with wounds from his companions’ knives up and down his segmented back. I swirl away untouched, and now I have his knives: long stolen crescents that whirl and cut, not in the inexorable chopping of a legion soldier, but in the sharp planes and arcs of high geometry. Here are Pythagoras and his sanctuaries, and there are two dead enemies; here is Euclid’s treatise on conic sections drawn in silver on the endless sky, and an additional thesis on the properties of the spiral that would have delighted Apollonius, and as the spiral finishes and the bodies in motion continue, only one of them moves of its own volition, the other sinking lifeless to the ground. No doubt these maggot sicarii are magical and monstrous, but I am incontestable. This is not combat, it is truth. I step between my enemies, bisecting angles and bodies at once, and each of my movements alters the topography so that my enemies do not understand it and cannot respond. Theon, Autolycus, Pappus: I name them as I use them in a way I had never imagined, and when Ptolemy’s cosmos rolls out before me, the gyrations of the constellations around the earth, I know where each end will come in the inevitable conjunctions of ichor and blood. Stretched an instant on tiptoe I see Orion’s hunt, then the rage of Chiron and the weaving of Arachne, the hands and the knives they hold following the stars in the mortal heavens. I trace the inevitable patterns of summer and winter and speak the names of the goddess: Demeter, Persephone, Isis, as I recall the ebb and flow of the heavens. I see the Crab, the Scorpion, and the Snake, and then the sun and moon themselves as I step between the last two still standing, and for the first time they realise they are alone, and are afraid. I wish for mercy, but the judgement that I have become does not heed me. The Alkahest is the rage of Diana at the affront of Actaeon, and the hounds are loosed. My right hand rises like dawn, and my left sketches nightfall. My enemies cough as if at a change in the wind, and I stand alone in a field of corpses, a reeking underworld of my own making.