Most of them are unlocked. He finds needles and threads and sheets of rough spun cotton.  Some cupboards have vials of aqua fortis and something that might be an embalming fluid.  There are forceps and scalpels and a few handheld bone saws.  There’s one wardrobe full of dark brown robes with attached tasseled sash belts.

He'll take a scalpel and a robe then. Perhaps he can pass for whatever kind of cultist or medicine man operates this place.

He leaves the belt sash loose, with the robe parting down the middle and exposing his chest.

He returns to the giant skull’s cage. "Forgive me.  What is your name? And what is a mimir?

"Morte.  Like, uh, Latin, for death.  And, we're Almanacs.   Encyclopedias. You can read me a letter and then ask for it again two weeks from now, or fifty years from now, and I can repeat it exactly. Or else I can describe a map I've seen in perfect detail.  There's a library's worth of books 'twixt these ear holes. 

"Reason I’m here has to do with that.  I was bound to a sorcerer.  Still am.  Came to this place once and I got left behind.  Only, when the dusties realized how valuable I'd be for the recordkeeping they knocked me out cold and put me in here."

The concept of a mimir doesn’t sound familiar, but it also doesn’t seem entirely implausible or inconsistent with the splintered remnants of his memories.

There are people who can manipulate reality through mental concentration. They are called wizards or sorcerers and they practice the Art.

There are known spell forms that anyone with sufficient intellect and strength of will can memorize and learn to substantiate. Maybe one in thirty men could manage it, if taken as children and raised by wizards.

Strong wizards are exceedingly rare and can do things that might otherwise seem impossible or in violation of natural law. Some such wizard might have the capacity to create an entirely new variety of animal life and to endow it with a fragment copied of their own mind, like a parent to a child but much more rapidly, and much more imperfectly. Some such person created mimirs… probably.

Or else they are natural creatures from some distant corner of reality. But then why do they look exactly like giant human skulls? How do they breed?

"I don't know of such creatures, but I have picked up some scraps of the Art, and I can see that you have the appearance of a wizard’s familiar, but the mind of a man. Though there is a great deal more than that woven around you."

He gazes at Morte intently for a moment.

And then a spark of un-reality flickers through his mental landscape, like the feeling of suddenly realizing that he is dreaming, or that he is watching a play on a stage. Again there is the sensation of an interior voice cresting into his awareness. This one is different, coming with its own personality. The tone is skeptical and cynical, and it repeats a single sentence:

An amnesiac wakes up next to a talking skull that claims to be an encyclopedia.

An amnesiac wakes up next to a talking skull that claims to be an encyclopedia.

Implausible.

"Do you know my name?" he says to Morte

Morte performs a small tilting gesture, cocking his skull sideways.  "Do I know what the self-proclaimed wizard street brawler calls himself when he isn’t getting picked up for a deader?  Gee.  No. I do not."

“You get a few screws knocked loose upstairs, chief?  You, uh, keep looking off into space.  And I am thoroughly not looking for trouble, mind.  Truly.  But neither of us is rolling in the lap of luxury at the moment, and it'd give me comfort to know you’ll act with a bit of sense.”

“Possibly.”

“I’ve been damaged in some way, I think, and the damage has a quality that feels… deliberate. I don’t remember my name. There are many blank spaces."

"If you please, then. As a mimir, what have you read of magics or strong medicines that can excise parts of the memory?"

"Aside from the magic of cheap gin?  I can think of a few more exotic theories, actually.  But maybe we start with the likely ones.  You sure you haven't been drinking? Maybe puffing the pipe of peace with something foul and amber-colored?  Like as not the bodies they bring in here are the ones found in the gutter or in the alleys outside of the Twin Cobras.  What's the last thing you remember?"

He begins shaking his head to answer the first question in the negative, but then thinks better of it and closes his eyes to concentrate.

He does have some memories, but he can see at a glance that there are far too few. And none have the crispness of recency.

He remembers being an adolescent and serving a cruel master of a blacksmith, spending long hours staring at a particular knot in the wood of a ceiling beam while he lay on his back in pain and exhaustion at day's end. He remembers climbing the rigging of a sailing ship in calm seas, mending some portion of the main mast sail. He remembers swiftly rummaging through crates in a warehouse, and dropping the attending guard to the ground with a wave of his hand and a cast of the spell known as Chromatic Orb. In that memory he thinks he was calm. Bored, even.

A practiced criminal, then? And a wizard.

But he has no memories of parents. Nor of any wife, lover, or child. He remembers meeting many people. But when he pulls on the thread of any one of these memories and interrogates it for the part he knows must be there - the "Mister so-and-so. Charmed to make your acquaintance." - it just isn't there.

And where is his home? He must have traveled the material plane extensively. His breadth of memories readily proclaim that. He thinks of a half a dozen cities where he knows the locations of public houses, of lawyers, of merchants and local lords. Is he the victim of some rival who sought to separate him from his resources? Or did he catch a stray spell in a street gang fight with some kind of powerful mentalist?

"No. Not drink. Something a lot more thorough. My head is like a cheese with holes in it… Only the holes are always in the places I'd look if I wanted to find the people who would know me."

He looks around the room again. 

"Where in the planes are we?”

“That's a depressing thought.”

Morte's voice does not sound depressed.

“We're in The Hive.  In Sigil.  The city of doors.  The material plane-adjacent.  The place where the fulcrum balances.  You know it?”

He nods slowly. His mind’s eye calls up a mental image of a humanoid woman twenty feet tall, her face a mass of sharp knives. A demigod or outsider who holds absolute sway over a city full of portals. A cosmopolitan, chaotic place where sudden planar doors can open in a wall or between two fence posts or inside a cabinet or anywhere, really, without warning. Each requiring a key, either a specific object cast into the rift and thereby expended and lost, or a gesture performed, and invisible unless the key is present.

“Hmm. I know of the Lady of Pain and the rebuses that man the city. I have walked before the siege tower and the market square. That much I can recall.

Tell me everything you know about how I came to be in this room."

"Sure.  Two men - I don’t know their names but they've come before… four times in the last three months, and in plainclothes, real salt of the earth types, not robes like the one you're wearing - brought you in on a cart less than an hour ago.  

"If I had to bet I’d say you were picked up from somewhere nearby.  There’s a dusty at the gate'll give five silver pence for any corpse that still contains all its inner gooey bits.

"All but the three lying near that sheila are fresh, came in on the cart with you.  You could see if any of them tickle your memory, though, to my eyes they don’t exactly look ‘of a feather’ with you."

He walks to one of the nearby corpses. A man with a visible club foot and some marks on the arms where crutches had clearly been worn for years.

He does a circuit around the other occupied stone tables. Then he looks off into the distance for the span of a minute, willing his mind to conjure up any memories connected with any of their faces.  

Then he returns to Morte.

“As you say.”

He takes a look at the bars. What are they made of?

The cage appears to be made of interwoven lengths of thin metal bar, around a quarter inch in width. It forms a grid that leaves spaces of around 3”x3”.

“Now. I believe I can get you out of here, and I would see you free if I can afford the consequences. What are these dusties? What are they likely to do if they found you’ve fled with me?”

“They’re neither the worst nor the least worst sort of men to have as enemies in The Hive.  The dustmen is what their order call themselves.   Almost everybody deals with them occasionally and they'll readily deal with anybody.  They’ve got a thing for corpses.”  He does a small head shake.  “No relation to me, mind you.  They just… have some portion of the necromantic side of the Art figured out.  They make vessels - take the deaders that’ve died in tavern fights or from palsy - and they have a way of making them move again, like this sheila here.  Can’t do much, but can work endlessly at a simple task.  Most of them break down after a year or so, and then they’re good for nothing but the furnace.  And sometimes they’re even able to get information out of the corpses, memories and secrets too, but it’s a crapshoot.  

"Anyway, you make your face well known here as an enemy, and just maybe you’ll have a few men with knives in the dark to deal with.”

He nods. “And the sorcerer you’re bound to?”

“They have the power to compel me.  And I presume the ability to find me if they want.”

“How long has it been since you traveled with him? And what circle of wizard is he?”

He looks somewhat sheepish.  “Err.  Part of my binding is a rule that says I speak no distinguishing features about them except to those who already know.  That includes the information regarding the last time I traveled with them.”

"Really?” He raises an eyebrow. “Those precautions sound… thorough. Your master must be a threatening adversary."

In his understanding of the Art, the creation of a compulsory mental or behavioral binding is costly and difficult in proportion to the cleverness and the stubbornness of the target. Morte gives the impression of being quite well endowed in both attributes.

He faces a dangerous choice. If his coming across Morte in this place was by chance, then it is far too good an opportunity to pass up. If this meeting were orchestrated by an ally, then chances are high he'll meet that ally shortly and be able to confirm that his arrival in this basement was part of the plan. If orchestrated by a foe, then he should rely upon this mimir as little as possible for as short a time as possible, only until he gains enough coin and knowledge to strike out safely on his own. Though, in that scenario there is value in learning what he can of his adversary through Morte.

Ugh.

He groans inwardly. The thought of trying in his present state to pump Morte for information while conveying a false picture of his own intentions and knowledge in order to create misdirection and to lay a trap sounds difficult enough to make his head ache.

But laying it out like that, the correct choice is clear.

"Then here’s my proposition. We escape together and you travel with me for a span of seven days. You answer truthfully all of the questions I put to you, and you don’t act against my interests as you understand them. If I act in any way that threatens your interests, you tell me promptly. What say you to these terms?”

The Nameless One feels an itching sensation under his robe about the shoulders and back of the neck.

“Best escape offer I’ve heard today. Count me in.

But if you’re going to do it it’s better now than later. We’re well after dawn already and there’ll be a breakfast bell sooner or later and then this place will be crawling with dusties.”

He nods. ”Once I begin we may not have time to speak further. First, tell me about your capacity for movement.

Can you change your height? Can you lift weight? Can you fly? Can you scale a fence or wall?"

“Fly? No.  And no one is going to be riding me anywhere if they want to keep their fingers.

"My binding keeps me at about this height.  I can change it slightly”, he demonstrates.  “It's like jumping, I guess, but I can do it either upwards or downwards.  I can manage my way on stairs but need to be carried to get over a wall."

He pauses.  "Anything else?  I weigh about twelve stone."

"And what's the best way out of here?"