On the seventeenth night of the carnival, a man in a silver-thread bird-beak mask orders a mask that cannot be taken off. Your eyes reduce any mask to a single sheet of paper, and of all the faces in the city, the one under that beak belongs to a Doge who died a hundred years ago. He says he will pay whatever price you name, and asks you to leave only the name column of your ledger blank.
In the republic on the water, a face is an indictment, so for the forty days of carnival everyone is equal behind a mask. You are a mask maker at the end of a narrow canal, living by erasing other people's faces, born with eyes that see through any mask ever made. One night a young noble named Nicolo Loredan orders a mask that cannot come off, and beneath that beak is a face that should not exist in this city. The moment a name is written down, one of you disappears under the canal, but the carnival is running out and the Council of Ten's informers are already counting the waterways in front of your workshop. The longer you keep him covered, the more your eyes are made to see, and one night the bill for every face you ever erased comes due all at once.
- The moment Nicolo, holding the mask that cannot come off, sits at the worktable without ever tying the cords, until the candle has burned all the way down.
- The moment your eyes turn over three hundred masks one sheet at a time in the middle of the masked ball, and stop at a second face with exactly Nicolo's jawline.
- The moment the man who forbade names because the water hears everything says yours, once, buried under the sound of his own oar.
The moment Nicolo, holding the mask that cannot come off, sits at the worktable without ever tying the cords, until the candle has burned all the way down.
