So, we only have ten chapters left… and a lot of ground to cover.

Erik mentally reviewed the set phrases of the social niceties as an actor might rehearse his lines before opening night. In the privacy of the hired carriage, he discarded various conversational gambits, adjusted where he might place emphasis in professional statements, and lamented his costuming.

It was always a gamble, deciding how to present himself to new acquaintances. A full mask was how he was most comfortable but he knew this often excited more curiosity than it was worth. Even his newest mask that he had made in Nice would not pass muster in close quarters, especially hatless. The false nose and moustache did little to hide his ugliness, but at least made him tolerable to look at it and raised no questions. He had made a recent addition of a wig, which vexed him greatly. He had at least had a decent head of hair in his youth. Its gradual loss over the last decade was insulting in its normalcy. This morning, on a whim, he had decided that glasses would be a suitable final touch. He was wrong. The arms were too tight and wanted to tangle in the wig. But he had taken the precaution of adhering them slightly to the nose—taking off the one item would be the destruction of the entire disguise.

He blamed his current conundrum on a lack of sleep, which he in turn blamed on the Daroga.

He had just meant to stop in on the Daroga. He had meant to tell him of his upcoming employment, presenting this fait-almost-accompli as proof of his competency. The old man would not dare shake his head at what Erik chose to do with his life! And then he would be off, to get a good night's rest and put his papers in order before appearing at the solicitor's office at a very civilized late morning hour.

The evening had not gone according to plan. Even after the errand boy had escorted Mojgan back to her townhome, Erik had stayed with Nadir for several hours. The Daroga, it seemed, took great exception to the fact that Erik had offered his help. But why? He did not think that what Mojgan wanted to do was wrong, nor particularly difficult. Erik had disappeared and started over so many times in his own life that it seemed like quite the usual thing to do. Apparently, that was not the case for well-bred women.

…Or perhaps the issue the Daroga took exception to was that Mojgan appeared inclined to accept Erik's help, such as it was.

Well, the Daroga clearly did not know what he wanted. One moment, he wanted Erik to learn how to live like a proper man above ground; the next, he wanted him to rescind a perfectly chivalrous offer of aid to a lady in distress. Clearly, the years were taking a toll on Nadir's wits. Poor fellow—Erik knew what it was like for the mind to slip away. That the older man was clearly worried about… all of them was not something Erik could help. Life, to everyone's surprise, simply marched on.

With that thought in mind, Erik gave a final, fatalistic adjustment to his wig and his cravat, and alighted from his cab.

Charles Garnier must have done an uncommonly good job of preparing the architectural firm's lawyers for Erik's arrival. There was little small talk and many eyes kept studiously fixed just above Erik's head. He read over the contracts quickly, signed them, and offered his hand to the solicitor. The man only hesitated for a moment before accepting the handshake. They had a clerk hail a cab for Erik again.

That was that. In ten days, Erik would be expected in Rouen at the construction site of the Opera House. It almost boggled the mind.

He had the carriage drop him in front of the post office on the Boulevard des Capucines. There were no messages awaiting 'O.G.' He supposed he had seen the last of those.

He made his way through the secret passages off the Rue Scribe, silent in his reflections. These stones—some of them he had set. These pathways—they had been the way home for so long. This building—he had been its heart, secretly beating and giving life and breath to the body of the theater. And yet, it seemed that every step he took into the cellars of the Opera brought him a little further away from its reality. No more would this be home. No more would this be life.

Erik did not know how he felt about that. He simply knew that it was. For the moment, he was the anchorless, rudderless ship being carried by the currents. Where it would land him—who could say? He had always been surprised by where he ended up. And wherever it was that the currents washed him to, he would find himself thinking, I suppose this is the place I shall die.

But that had not happened. Yet.

He made a rough inventory of his home for the second time in recent memory. He noted what he should arrange to take with him at once, and what could wait for some future removal. He passed by the closed entryway of the mirrored room and thought of what things could stay behind entirely. He would have lost himself in the business of moving bits of this life into his new one, had he not had a second appointment to keep. The hours passed in a myriad small tasks. He listened for the chiming clock in the sitting room. When it went eleven, he made to leave. He paused at his front door, eyes locked on the black waters in front of him.

Yes. It really was time to go. Wasn't it?

Mojgan had expressed some concern about his ability to steal into her townhome undetected. Erik assured her that he was still perfectly capable of finding his way into a second story window with the greatest stealth.

(The Daroga, for some reason, had replied to this assurance with a groan. Not that it had concerned him in the least.)

And, indeed, Erik was quick to find the address she had given him, quick to identify the curtained window that would lead into her boudoir, and quick to make friends of the shadows that would disguise his entrance. Thanks to the latch being left off, his entry caused barely a stir.

The room was lit by a low fire and a small kerosene lamp. Mojgan was in the chair closest to the lamp, a book in hand. She rose with a smile, and led Erik to another dimly-lit seat, well out of view of the door.

"The doors are locked," she said, her voice kept low. "And there shouldn't be anyone in this part of the house at this hour as it is. The staff is accustomed to me sitting up late."

Erik nodded, nevertheless scanning the small room. A doorway led to a bedroom, another presumably to the hallways. All was quiet in the house. He turned his attention back to Mojgan, dressed in a heavy peignoir and slippers. She must have caught his glace, for she shrugged.

"I couldn't very well tell my maids I had gone to bed while dressed for dinner," she said. "Besides, it isn't as though you haven't seen my ankles before—imagine the scandal that would have caused in Paris, if I had brought my short skirts and anklets from home."

"Do you miss them?" he asked, amused. He matched her low tone.

"Not enough to return to where I can wear them," she shot back. "I also couldn't very well have the maids leave a tea service for two. But I have wine, if you'd like?" She was already pouring out one glass.

Erik shook his head.

"Are you sure? It's an excellent Tokay, and I know you are fond of your sweet wines. And I'm afraid that I am known to leave more than one glass littered about my rooms, so we needn't worry about having too many cups left out as Nadir would otherwise remind us."

"Tempting, but no," he gestured to his face, covered almost entirely by a dark mask so as to blend in with the shadows. "I did not dress with a view to indulging in wine."

She paused, with a second wine glass in hand. "Erik," she said gently. "I have seen your face."

That startled him. "When?" She looked like she did not want to answer him, but he fixed her with a serious stare. "When?"

"The day the Shah—" she gestured vaguely at her eyes.

The day the Shah had tried to have his eyes gouged out. If he tried, he had some vague memory of seeing Mojgan soon after that mess and… well, when would he have had the chance to put on a new mask in between? He pushed those thoughts away and huffed out a breath. "Well. Well. Be that as it may, Erik does not want to put you off your wine. Especially if it is excellent Tokay."

She looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded. "That is your choice, Erik. For your own comfort. You needn't think of mine. Excuse me—I think I need a shawl." She set the wine glass next to Erik and slipped into the next room. Erik glanced at her retreating back, and then at the glass. He found he had time to slip off his mask and take a few appreciative sips before he heard Mojgan's steps return. Given the careless way her cashmere shawl was tossed over one shoulder, Erik knew he had guessed right: it had been a kind pretense.

When she sat again, her tone was businesslike. "I'm glad you came. There was much I did not want to say to Nadir, in case he is asked later. I did not want to put him in the position of lying for me. But I feel like I need to speak with someone."

"I do not know if I will be much help talking to," Erik said. "My use has always been in the doing."

"Well, something will need to be done. I'm just not sure quite what." She pulled a note out of her book and handed it over to Erik. "I wrote to Naveed—I have known him the longest out of Reza's aides, and I thought I would find him the most sympathetic."

Erik glanced over the note, its letters squiggling on the paper. "I confess, it has been a long time since I've tried to read this much Persian." He could pick out a few familiar phrases, but otherwise did not want to resort to sounding out the consonants.

"Well, Naveed was clearly misnamed," she sighed. "He did not bring me good news. I'm not sure if it's a matter of 'can't or 'won't,' but the result is he isn't going to help."

"And so that is the end of your official channels?" Erik asked.

"Oh, I could go down the entire list of Reza's staff and then start in on the embassy, but Naveed was useful in that respect at least. He let me know in a few, shall we say, well-chosen words that the current interests lie in filling the power vacuum Reza left. Aiding me in this might be viewed as more of a hindrance to that end, rather than a help."

"I don't suppose someone might think to combine the two?" Erik asked significantly.

Mojgan snorted. "Someone might think it."

"But not put it into practice?"

"Do you know, Erik," she said, "I have been lucky with my husbands. I have married two men, and it turned out that I liked both of them. But if I marry again, I would want to do things in reverse: like the man, and marry him because of that."

Ah, what a different life she had lived! To speak of finding not one or two, but perhaps three of life's companions as if it was a simple matter of choice. What would that be like? "Do you think to marry again?" Erik asked, morbidly interested in this novelty. "Politically or otherwise?"

The question brought her up short, and she spent a time in blinking silence. "I—don't know. I suppose that is a thought for a different day. But I will not be marrying another Persian politician."

"Not to sound like the Daroga haranguing you," Erik said, "but I would assume you have contacts outside of Persian politicians."

She grimaced. "Of a sort. I am not well-established here in France. The wives of envoys mix less in company here than in the other places I've been. Perhaps the Princess Trubetskoy? She's been known to go to great lengths to help a friend, but she is unpredictable and if things go wrong and my primary associate is Russian?" She made an incongruously delicate gesture of slitting her throat. "I dare not call on those I know in England: the international ramifications could be dire. We were most in society in Italy, and there may be those I can call on." She shook her head. "But I want to be done with this life. No more la femme publique. God give me death." She poured more wine into her glass. "You must think me a fool. I think I'm a fool." She drank. "I am afraid."

Erik stepped away for a moment, to follow her example and drink his wine. He readjusted his mask, and let his quiet voice carry over to her. He knew her talk of death was just a quirk of her mother tongue. And yet… every time he had spoken in Persian about death, it had been in all seriousness. "What of?"

"Failure," she said. "Success. Going home. Staying abroad."

"Ah," Erik said as he resumed his seat. "The Unknown. I am well acquainted with her. Fickle mistress, to be sure. But she loses some of her powers of intimidation if you are not alone." Or so Erik assumed. He had no practical experience on that score. It still sounded like a reasonable thing to say.

She shook her head. "When I first came to Paris, and learned Nadir was here—learned you were here—I was so happy." Her voice turned meditative. "I did not know what it meant to be truly isolated until the day after you left me at my father's house. Oh, I was relieved to be free of the Sultana! But home was never home again. I did not think I was bothered by being alone, but when Reza came my way, I certainly took the chance. I thought perhaps his world would be a good compromise for me. Safe from the things I feared, but not quite so black and white as my little life in Ghazvin. I was wrong. My secret terrors remained my secret terrors." Now her voice took on an uncharacteristic note of bitterness. "I did not realize that I had been hoping for someone to save me. And here I am again— I saw you and Nadir and I thought, Here is someone who knows. Someone who does not need an explanation."

Shall I tell you about my cellar full of wet gunpowder? You may not be so quick to confide your fears in the monster who did that. But Erik held his tongue, and simply said, "Much has happened since… those days."

"You mean you might not actually be able to read my mind?" she said with a sudden smile. "Yes. I know. But do I really need to tell you why I am frightened to return to Tehran as the only woman outside of the royal harem to have spent time in Europe?" Erik shook his head in a mute negative. "Well, then. That's more than I can say for anyone else. And, margeh man, I am not explaining myself to Naveed."

There it was again: death, death, death. How was it Erik had not realized at the time how the obsession with blood was woven into the very fabric of the language? Oh, he knew that was not the whole story of Persia: he knew that there was good food and close families, beautiful art and heroic histories. There were millions of people who lived their lives happily and died peacefully. But that had not been Erik's life there—and it saddened him to realize that had not truly been Mojgan's life, either.

Wasn't it enough for the Shah's court to gather its foreign novelties to abuse and discard? Did it also need to eat its own children? Perhaps Mojgan did not need to wear a mask to hide what twists and cuts her time there had wrought on her—her own skin did that well enough. But Erik became suddenly aware of a mismatch of the smooth, coolly polite face she maintained even as she said God give me death.

…At least her mask was protecting something good.

"So, then," he said softly, "you disappear."

"You make it sound simple," she said. "It's anything but."

"The aide," Erik said with his typical disinterest in the satellites of powerful men, "has already said you are not worth an international incident." Mojgan raised her eyebrows at his phrasing, but then nodded in agreement. "If you choose to ignore politics, politics may well choose to ignore you."

"I do agree," she said, "or at least hope. I have no official standing outside of Reza. But therein is a source of trouble: I have no official standing. I have no identity outside of the Persian diplomatic missions. You say that it is easy enough to get new papers and a new name: fine, I trust you. But my fortune back in Iran will be lost to me. And the resources I can command here are… limited, without Reza."

"But not, I think, nonexistent," Erik murmured. He was starting to see her situation sort itself out before his mind's eye: there, a tangle to be cut through. There, an objection to be circumvented. It had been easier to speak with her than he would have guessed. As much as he pushed aside thoughts of Mazandaran, there was something about this dim boudoir that reminded him of old talks in the twilight. They used to keep secrets from one another, he knew. He had never—would never—confessed the extent of his crimes. She had never violated the privacy of her dead husband. They never spoke of those days they had passed one another coming and going in the palace. But for all that, the words they had spoken had always been honest. It appeared that old habits, even very old habits, died hard. And that was why he could tease her with confidence: "Or have you changed so much from the girl who fled with nothing more than an attaché case of deeds and jewelry?"

She struggled not to laugh, and ended up biting a finger to keep from making too much noise. "I suppose not. But I will only have what I can carry." She took a deep breath, and then nodded with something like her old determination. "But I can carry quite a bit."

"Then it is settled," Erik said.

"Is it?" The eyebrows were truly flying now.

"You shall start anew," he said grandly. It was easy to declare it so, as if it was another simple line in a play, and not a woman's whole life. "May I have a few days to think how that might be accomplished?"

She replied with her own facetiously dignified nod. "You have thirty-one." A pause. "Or, rather, not. You're leaving."

Oh, that. Rouen had flown from his mind for the past hour. Truthfully, he had been glad to put it from his mind. Though now, with the cogs of his mind running, he thought Rouen may not be quite so bad. "It's time enough," he said. As an afterthought, he added, "You said you trusted me, Mojgan." Unwise as that may be.

She smiled over the rim of her once-again refilled wine glass. "I do. Will you be sorry to leave Paris? Nadir said you have been here many years."

It was a troubling question, one without an easy answer. "What was it you said earlier? Home was never home again?" Deciding that he would still be quite capable of scaling down the second story after two glasses of wine, Erik held out his glass for Mojgan to refill. Her hand wasn't quite as steady as it had been, but she still had the decency to concern herself with pointedly looking down to rearrange the ruffles on her peignoir and the fringes on her shawl until she heard him set the glass back down. "How much has the Daroga said?"

"About?..." she asked, in a way that let Erik know she had heard far too much from the old man.

"Where I live, for instance," he prompted.

"I know that you have a flat in the Palais Garnier," she said, "you built it, after all."

Erik was loathed to confess that he had not, in fact, singlehandedly built the Opera House and so merely nodded.

"How long have you been there?"

"Six, seven years?" He said. "It was a convenient bolt-hole during the civil unrest of the Paris Commune and I thought—why not make it comfortable in the meantime? I have never been a revolutionary, you see, and was not about to start with a lost cause. I had come to the project just a few months before to help with a problem with the water pumps, so the bowels of the building were already my domain."

"Have you ever been involved with a building project and not seen it as your domain?"

"No," he answered truthfully. "But sometimes it is… truer than other. I think the Opera might be the truest of all, for all it is called the Garnier."

"Even more than Roshaneh Darya?" Mojgan asked, and it took Erik a moment to realize she meant the palace in Mazandaran—his Kingdom by the Sea.

"Infinitely."

She nodded slowly. "And so you've been there ever since."

"Not quite. The Commune ended. Work on the opera house continued. I made it clear to the architect and the foreman that I could be… useful. And so I was. But for those few years, I did not always stay here. I would rent this or that little garret, where the landlords did not care if rent was paid by an envelope slipped under their door. When the neighbors when get nosy—" or violent, he omitted— "I would find some other place that met the same description." Not bad days, those. Enough of the workmen had bought his story of a terrible construction accident to not comment or care too much about the mask. And apparently the impression he had had that Charles Garnier almost liked him had been correct. "But then the Paris Opera came home to the Garnier, and what had simply been a building suddenly became… much more."

"Of course," Mojgan broke in. "It's the music."

"Yes."

"It's always been the music," she said, almost a murmur to herself. "The buildings were so marvelous one could be blinded by them—but the music."

Erik knew what she was speaking of. Music on tars and geychecks, songs sung with guttural ghs and aspirated khs. Still music, but not quite his music—even when he was playing his own compositions.

He wondered if she actually had a notion of that fact, for she suddenly asked, "Do you remember when you tried to teach me the piano?"

He did. He remembered brief moments while her husband was still alive, when he would tag along behind Nadir during a visit, and show her a chord or two. He remembered far longer afternoons, when she was a widow, bringing her new scales. They had been happy moments: starlight pricking out through the growing darkness. He released a breath, suddenly conscious that he had been holding it in. For some reason, he didn't seem capable of answering that question. "I think we should go to the opera," he said instead. "I promised to show you the Garnier, after all."

"I—" she paused for a moment, a strange play of emotions flickering over her face. Erik couldn't quite parse them out: a little surprise, perhaps, something like pleasure, but then a sharp-edged cynicism. "I think I would enjoy that. It's a pity I can't be seen out of seclusion."

"Ah." Erik's first impulse was to call her bluff: clearly, she simply didn't want to go out with him, be seen with him. But how did that fit with what he knew to be true of Mojgan? It didn't. There was, however, one way to be certain. "You forget, my dear," he said in grandiose tones, "that I am a magician."

"Ah," she replied, with a flash of a smile. "That, I've never forgotten. The opera, and then I disappear. Is that the general idea?" He nodded and then stood. It was rapidly coming up on three in the morning. She also stood, and offered her hand again. "Now, would the magician like directions to the back door, or would he rather try his luck out of the window?"