Ping.

If Erik paid the slightest bit of attention, he could have heard nearly everything on the construction site. The raised voice of the foreman, the laughs and shouts of the workers, the shaping of stone, the sawing of wood, hammering, pounding, digging: such was the symphony of assembly.

Ping.

A symphony that did not much interest him at the moment. He was absorbed in his own solo performance. He sat in one of the mostly-completed rooms of the main building, cross-legged, with his attention focused on his anvil and hammer.

Ping, ping, ping.

The gold sheet was taking on a nice curve. Erik would have been pleased, if he had not been so intent. This was the third lion-shaped automaton he had worked on. The first one had been a disaster from the start. Its unfinished head stared at Erik from across the makeshift workshop. The second had been assembled with some alacrity. The paws batted playfully at a model bird and the mouth connected to a drum of al-Jazari's programmable model.

This third specimen was coming together as quickly as Erik could manufacture the desired parts. He could see the entire mechanism unfurled before his mind's eye, layers of gears and pumps and casings. Now this was real magic, forcing a vision into reality. For the moment, it was the only thing he was truly aware of.

Ping, ping, scratch, ping—

When he finally emerged from the creative spell, Erik was faced with a more or less complete product. Some details added to the mane, a good polish, a connection to the palace's hydraulic mechanism, and his lion would come roaring to life.

He gazed into the empty eyes of beast, imagining them fitted with lifelike glass models. Or glittering gems? Knowing the Shah, it would be the latter, though Erik thought the former would be a better choice.

With the absence of distraction, Erik slowly noticed how quiet his workroom was. What outside noise penetrated in was subdued. It was probably dark outside.

Tick.

He focused on the muffled sound of his watch. Several seconds passed before another tick-tick came from his pocket. It was a very fine timepiece and probably the most useful gift the Shah had bestowed on Erik. If it was losing time, Erik could only assume that he had forgotten to wind it. But he distinctly recalled winding it that morning. Well, at least he had done so the last morning Erik remembered.

Other details came slowly into focus for him: the scratch of stubble against his mask, the piles of ash around the brazier, a dark pit of hunger gnawing in his gut.

The question of how many days this time? was not one he wanted to answer.

He stood and stumbled. His knees were sore and his eyes blurred a little. He took off the mask, rubbed at his face, and then cursed. He had kept the stupid thing on far too long, if his raw chaffed cheeks were any indication. Still cursing, he forced down a few pistachios and a gulp of cold (and probably disgustingly old) tea.

He made sure that the room was locked up tightly and then departed through one of the palace's many hidden passages. Between the behind-walls labyrinth he had designed and the carefully constructed acoustics, the Shah's courtiers would be hard pressed to keep a single spoken word secret. Erik imagined that he would personally find it immensely useful. After all, what better way to protect oneself than knowing one's enemies? And what better way to learn of the enemy than through their supposed secrets?

He was beginning to appreciate that blackmail could be an infinitely more elegant solution to some of his difficulties than the ones he currently employed. Elegant, and considerably less nightmare inducing. He was growing sick of waking up screaming, his mind full of filmy, accusing eyes. How long would they follow him around? For the rest of his life? Into eternity? The thought invited a wave of nausea to overcome him. He paused, leaning against the roughly finished stone.

He pushed aside the queasiness and tried to put things into proper perspective. Hungry. Tired. Hurt, betrayed, furious— He stopped again. It was tempting to push it all aside, to tear apart each bit of pain and bury it, but that had not gone well last time. For a brief while, he had managed to forget the rift that had arisen between himself and the Daroga, only to be forcibly reminded of it when he had seen the man and recognized the horrid, sanctimonious disdain in his eyes.

Mojgan had been there as well, he remembered. But her soft eyes and reassuring smiles were simply not enough. There had been a terrible quarrel, as usual. Erik had… well, he couldn't quite remember that, either.

But he did remember waking up one morning, getting dressed, winding his watch, and thinking about al-Jazari's Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanics.

He couldn't even guess when that had been. He swallowed a few more pistachios, made sure his mask was secure, and stepped out into an open courtyard.

He had been wrong about the time. It was not late at night, but dawn. Dawn and a deserted construction site could only mean Friday. Which in turn meant—three days and four nights? That sounded about right, give or take a day.

He was not surprised to find his horse gone. One of the overseers had been instructed to take care of it, if and when Erik disappeared for too long. But who was there to take care of Erik? No one had stayed to lead him to pasture and make sure he was properly fed.

And if someone had, what would you have done? Would you have played the role of docile domestic beast, allowed yourself to be petted and attended to?

He found a group of guards and slaves towards the south of the palace, and commandeered one of their horses. At an easy trot, he would reach the Nowshahr Palace in under an hour. For once, that palace was a desirable prospect. He could kill for a cup of tea.

Oh, why would Erik think such a thing? What is wrong with you, you unnatural freak?

…ah, Erik answered his own question, as usual. Are you hell spawned or merely hell bound?

His inner monologue took on Nadir's tone, and Erik found himself cursing aloud to drown out the sound. He urged his mount into a canter, but the beast could not maintain it long. He was tempted to kick again and again until they reached his desired traveling speed, but stopped.

Beat the beast out of your own beastliness, will you?

"Erik will not," he shouted, "I will not."

He turned his thoughts firmly to breakfast, and the people he would not kill to get it. Perhaps he should bypass the palace and go to Mojgan's home? She was always willing to feed him and it infuriated Nadir to no end.

Upon further consideration, no. Nowshahr Palace appeared quickly enough and Erik fell into his usual routine of glaring and weaving in and out of sight. There was an undercurrent of agitation at the gates, but Erik ignored it. He would surely discover its meaning later.

"Jadugar Agha!"

He turned to see one of the harem guards coming in his direction. The stone-faced façade expected of the Shah's officers had slipped. The man looked quite troubled.

"What?"

"The Sultana—"

That was enough for Erik. He forgot such notions as bed and breakfast as he pushed past the guard and headed towards the women's enclave.

It was in uproar. From behind the walls, he could hear her. She was screaming—howling. She had forsaken her broken Persian for her rustic Arabian dialect. He barely understood a word, though he was fairly certain that some of those words were obscene.

Even he could not pass the stoic eunuch guards into the inner courtyards, but someone must have told her that Erik had arrived.

She fairly flew out, whirling like a dervish with her robes swirling about her in a furious striped tempest. Her arms were flung out wide. For an instant Erik thought she intended to embrace him.

She did not. Still crying madly, she struck at him repeatedly, her small hands curled into feeble fists. Perhaps she was not so feeble—she angled her rings into Erik's stomach and put a fierce amount of power behind each blow.

He fought not to recoil or retaliate, though he was desperately inclined to do both. He took steadying breath after steadying breath and clamped down on the violence each act of violence called up in him. He watched her with his eyes wide and his hands kept rigidly at his sides.

"You—" Persian words were slipping back into her diatribe. Erik listened intently. "You—" that was definitely an insult—"weren't—you – there!"

The hits slowed. Her tears caught in her throat and she screamed again. "You weren't there!" Her fist connected with his ribs again, three times in short succession. He finally caught her hand after the last strike and held it.

"Sultana?" he kept his voice low and calm. "Dear Sultana, what happened?"

She collapsed then, crumpling to the stone ground like an unstrung marionette. Erik, perforce, went down with her.

In some other world he might have actually enjoyed himself. It was a fascinating thing to see so proud a creature brought so low, to have a woman's tears soak the cuff of his jacket. She was too distraught to pull away from his awkward pats of comfort. With the rosy tints of morning catching on the nearby fountains and flowers, he could almost picture himself in that other world. There he was, in his beautiful garden with his beautiful lady (a lady as any other man might keep one, not a liege lady) crying to him over some small trifle.

You weren't there. If you had been there, everything would have been better.

I'll never leave you again, Dream Erik would assure his delicate Dream Lady. And they lived happily until the Destroyer of All Happiness came…

But apparently, the Destroyer had tried to intrude upon the Sultana. He pieced together her story as best he could, sorting through the invectives and tears.

Someone had tried to kill her.

…and you were not there to protect her.

He turned the thought over and over in his mind, oddly detached. He looked at the raw, bloody cuts on one of her arms as a doctor might, assessing damage. It was certainly an interesting development, one he had not foreseen. What sort of fool tried to kill one of the Shah's wives in the Shah's own harem? It was almost a good thing that the Shah had departed on yet another hunting trip. Mazandaran would have been mayhem if so bold an assassination attempt had been made right under the Shah's very nose.

Abstractly, he thought of how Mojgan had nearly been killed, not eight feet away from the Shah himself. Had she wept and raged so? He doubted it. He shook the thought away.

Someone has attacked Erik's Sultana. What shall Erik do?

What was it that she had said once? Your fealty leaves something to be desired, Erik. He could not allow her to think such a thing again.

They remained on the ground for what seemed like hours, the Sultana a trembling mess of robes and veils. He listened to her haphazard theories carefully. Anis al-Dawla, she said. Erik thought it very unlikely that she would have masterminded such a move, but he did not say so. Farah Kamali, she said. Erik did not think that probable, either.

"Mahdeh Olia," she finally said, "has always hated me."

Mahdeh Olia would never have been so clumsy. He actually did voice that opinion, and was rewarded with a withering look.

"The assassin is in custody?" he asked.

She nodded, rubbing her eyes. Her fingers came away black with the remnants of her kohl.

He reached out to pat her shoulder again but let his hand fall short. They seemed to be past comforting now. Perhaps it was for the better. Erik did not know the first thing about consolation. "Then perhaps I shall speak with him, hm?"

She laughed at that. It was a brittle sound. "Do! Your friend the Daroga has him!"

Erik winced at the thought of seeing Nadir again so soon, but he would rally for his little sultana. After all, she ruled his heart, did she not?

She slowly transformed back to her usual self. Her slender fingers worried the hem of her outer robe, picking at loose threads.

"Back home, when a man committed such a crime, we would bind his hands and blindfold him and walk him round and round in circles so he did not know where he was," she whispered, "we would half cut his bounds and leave him out in the desert. Out in the desert, without food or drink. Just the sands, the endless sands. The sands are like mirrors, jagariman, mirrors that shine back on your soul and strip it bare—like, like sun bleached bones." She paused and lost something of the singsongish intonation she often acquired when she reminisced. "Once, when we came back to check on such a man, we found that he had taken his ropes and hanged himself in an old cypress tree." She giggled. "You could tell he hadn't done it properly. His toes were touching the ground."

"He strangled himself," Erik whispered.

She nodded. "Went mad and strangled himself. What a trick!" She grew quiet for a moment. "He deserves to go mad and strangle himself. Doesn't he?"

Erik could only assume she meant her would-be assassin, and so agreed.

Eventually, the Sultana skipped away. It seemed that she had forgotten her worries, but Erik could see the tightness in her posture. She was as defensive and mad as a caged tiger.

The eunuchs that had all but disappeared during her scene and later reasserted their presence and made it clear that Erik had no further business in their domain.

He couldn't agree more. His mind was awhirl with plans—or were they plots? Either way, they would certainly put the question of his devotion to rest.

The sands are like mirrors… The image was vivid in his mind, the mechanics of it laid bare like the workings of his automata. A mirror facing another mirror: infinite mirror images, all reflecting the mad agony of the desert dunes. (Or maybe pomegranates? He was fond of pomegranates and could probably eat a barrel of them at the moment.)

He was a magician, wasn't he? If not a magician, than certainly an illusionist. And it sounded like just the sort of illusion the Sultana needed to see in order to cheer her spirits.

"Jadugar Agha." The title and voice that used it took Erik by surprise. It came from a latticed window of the women's rooms. "Still playing knight-errant for the girl?"

Erik pressed his fingered through the eyeholes of his mask and rubbed. "Mahdeh Olia." He suffered to make a slight bow.

"You would do well to stay out of these walls, little man."

Erik cackled at the appellation. He and Nadir were of a height, and they were both frequently the tallest man in the room. But Erik would admit to not having quite so much weight on him. He thought suddenly of a dish of stew Mojgan had sent home with him one day. It had been some sort of specialty of her home region, a stew with tomatoes and barberries. The memory of it was making him salivate now. Stew certainly sounded delightful. Khoreshteh Khanum, perhaps? He laughed again. So he had turned cannibal, had he now?

"It sounds like I might have been of some use," he replied, "your guardsmen were certainly quite useless."

"Were they?" she asked, sounding a bit bored. "I think they did their duty splendidly."

"Then you wanted to see one of your son's wives bloodied and beaten?" Erik shot back. Damn, damn, damn. Erik will need his own cypress tree and Punjab lasso, if he continues in this vein. Won't I?

"You mock me," she sounded vaguely surprised.

"No, woman, you mock me." What gives you the right to mock me? Don't you know what I am?

Why does everyone want to poke at the monster? Don't they realize I can't control him?

There was a long pause. "I was not in jest when I told you to stay away from these courtyards. You have no business— no right to be here."

"No right but right of being," Erik shrugged. "I was called for."

"Even as Zahhak was called up as a savior—by fools. But his reign ended in fire and infamy."

"Perhaps. But who removed Zahhak from his throne? Did it not take the most valiant and fair of heroes to do so? Can you claim to be that, khanum?"

There was another pause, and when she spoke again, her voice was oddly whimsical. "Well, you took care of that, did you not? Hm? You know your epics, little man. Who conquered wicked Zahhak?"

The name was on the tip of Erik's tongue, but it refused to be spoken.

Mahdeh Olia answered for him. "Was it not Feridoon who took a mace to the monster? Well, this time the monster took the mace to Feridoon—and so fate has left me alone to cleanse my house."

This slander, again? Surely someone besides the dead man's own wife knew Erik to be innocent! "Peace, lady," Erik growled, "and leave Erik be."

"You wretch," she said. Her voice was less obscured now, as though she had come closer to screen, but still quite fey. "You pathetic skeleton. Did your mother love you, creature? You have a mother, after all. You are merely a man—a meager, measly man. My eyes are older than yours, Jadugar, and they have seen wonders and horrors beyond your conjuring. Conjure yourself some worth, if you insist on being called a wizard."

Erik had set his jaw painfully closed, and had to force it open. "Wretch and skeleton and wizard—I may be all of these or none of these, Madam. But what are you? You hidden, veiled creature with your waning power in your waning empire." He snickered, against his better sense. "Oh, yes. Cyrus the Great, you all say. The Persian Empire—the conquerors of the world. What have you now? Nothing, but a scrap of land between seas. Important only as a pawn between real world powers. You are an old woman with old ideas in an old land. What does your scorn mean to me?"

"My scorn is the scorn of the whole world," she said. "And if this is a pitiful, dying land, what does that make you? If the Shah is a man of small value to the world, what does that make his servant? You? Angel of Death? Ha. Perhaps the rat that comes to feed off of death, or the fly that lives on a corpse. Here is my prediction, Erik, and it comes from a surer magic than your tricks: your brilliance will blind you. Your deformity will sink ever deeper, until your heart and mind are as grotesque as your face. No man will call you friend; no woman will look on you as her lover. You are a ghost. You may masquerade as a man for now, but that illusion will fade—as all illusions must. You may continue to live, but you will not be alive. Go, ghost. Play at life while you may."

"Threats, khanum?" If she wanted threats, Erik could provide them in scores! He was about to bring this very fact to her attention when he heard the distinct sound of retreating footfalls.

Tick, tick, tick.

He should have been able to hear the general hubbub of the palace. The servants moving being the open windows, the distant clatter of mounted guards, the birdsong within the harem walls. But he could not. All he could hear—or at least hear and comprehend—was the ticking of his watch.

Tick.

He pulled it out again and looked at it curiously. A man could go mad from that sound, couldn't he? Erik could.

Tick.

…Well, that was an idea, was it not?

a/n: …and, yes, poor Erik's starving, sleep-deprived, Sultana-addled brain concocted 'Lady Stew.' Which is really just another way of saying that your authoress succumbed to the temptation of alliteration in a foreign language. Apologies. Also, I wrote this the morning after seeing a production of Richard III. It shows a bit more than I'd like.