An amnesiac and a talking encyclopedia walk into a bar

So she does.

Off he goes then. He vividly remembers the first few turns he made when fleeing the Mortuary earlier today, and he feels that if he can first reach there, he will eventually be able to locate the cuttlefish head tea house and then the alley in which he left Morte.

Having milked the opportunity of the tobacconist to the fullest, he’s now back to sailing in uncertain waters.

The most immediate next step is to find Morte, if the skull has not fled. That much seems obvious. He needs more knowledge of this city, the places to search most profitably for records of his past lives, and the places to avoid. There may also be some hall of learning where the marvel of his own immortality either as spectacle or subject of research might be traded for allyship and coin.

His top priorities now are:

To avoid being slain again and losing this day’s memories
To recover such resources of his prior incarnations as are not already spent
To study his enemy
To defeat his enemy

Concerning his resources: He notices he has some confusion regarding the Art and his own past experience with it. Something is amiss.

If he quickly leafs through his mind’s memories and builds up a running list of observations concerning the Art, what are the first ten which turn up?

The Art is a term that broadly covers the magic that is practiced by mortals across the planes

Unless you are the one-in-a-million mortals who have developed their Art to the point of interacting with the raw, mysterious machinery of the-source-of-all-magic, you are confined to learning and practicing certain pre-configured effects known called spells

These spells often vary in discrete intervals based on the mastery of the practitioner. A Magic Missile spell, for example, has five distinct vibrational modes. These modes scale the percussive force of the missile(s) linearly. One may not cast a Magic Missile that is soft enough, say, to pierce through one sheet of parchment but not ten sheets. The first vibrational mode is the lower limit on its power, and is already more than enough to break skin

Spells themselves also have something like vibrational modes of complexity, known as circles, which approximately demarcate them by the magnitude of their effect on reality and by their difficulty to prepare and cast. As one develops their Art, one always progresses sequentially through these circles, up to the limits of their magical potential. There are theoretically nine circles' worth of spells known to mortals, though a man fully devoted to pursuing the Art is unlikely to ever even witness an eight-or-ninth circle spell, let alone cast it himself

Wizards are one class of practitioners of the Art. Rather than having their powers be bestowed upon them by a patron or emerge naturally due to a latent magical strain in their blood’s heritage, wizards develop in power through careful study and intellectual grasp of the spell effects. The only requirements to begin training as a wizard are cleverness and discipline

The Nameless One has scraps of memory consistent with being a wizard of at least the third circle. He has cast Fireball with some regularity. He knows that wizards constitute no more than one in fifty of the mortal population, and fewer than one in fifty of those who stabilize a first circle spell will ever see fifth circle

Unless you are a very, very talented wizard, you will find that most spells require a verbal command, a physical gesture, and a small amount of a particular reagent. There are many spells which require the verbal, but not the gesture component, or vice versa. Among common reagents are sulfur, crushed pearl dust, and spider silk.

The quantity of needed reagent material is trivially small for simple spells - one one-thousandth of an ounce or less at first circle - but scales exponentially, such that the few wizards who can cast the most powerful known spells in the planes are often more limited by resources than by the rate at which their magic replenishes itself between spell castings

Unless a wizard desires to spend ten minutes quietly meditating in the heat of battle to cast a single spell, they require an anchor, such as a spellbook or scroll, which contains runes and diagrams corresponding to the spell’s shape, marked in a kind of magical ink laced with trace amounts of the particular spell’s material components. Prepared spells are anchors that are so named because they tie to a particular wizard’s mind and take shape in a conceptual, magical space beyond their mere physical presence. A wizard with a prepared spell must retain close proximity to their anchor, and must exert a constant, albeit minor mental effort to hold the spell, but can release it almost instantly, thereby expending it. At The Nameless One’s level of wizardry, a practitioner might carry in a bag tiny vials of the material components and mix them with spell ink at the time of preparing their spells

The casting of a spell takes something out of a wizard, and a wizard who has prepared and expended the entirety of their quota of spells will require at least eight hours of low-cognitive time to regain their full magical reserves. The pages of a wizard’s spellbook can be re-used a limited number of times in preparing the same spell by retracing the runes and marks of an expended anchor with fresh spell ink

Hmm.

Earlier today, he instinctively released a Chromatic Orb spell whilst fighting street thugs, but since he had not prepared one, nothing happened. And the reason it was instinctual to do so was because in past incarnations he has habitually prepared and cast that particular spell, in similar vein to how his fingers are supposed to (judging by the message on his tattoo) remember how to open his locked journal.

Visualization exercise: Imagine you have a spellbook before you. You open to a blank page. You have an entire apothecary catalog's worth of components neatly set out in jars, and you have all the inks that you could desire. You dip your pen into the prepared ink, you bring it to the page, and - what do you do?

Playing that out in his mind, he is at a total loss as to what runes or shapes he would draw.

Yeah. That’s more or less what he expected.

It’s another instance of carefully proscribed knowledge, like the forgetting of names.

The scars of precise scalpel strokes can be felt indirectly all throughout his cognition, now that he is becoming better at inferring them. He remembers the gesture to release the Chromatic Orb spell, but not how to prepare it. He remembers the governor’s mansion at Maha Bluff, crossing the foyer with the balcony and the two-fold grand staircase all done up in neat crimson, but he does not remember the governor’s name, nor his face.

And how would one even begin to attempt such an ambitious work of mental excision? The whole premise is absurd. How many names and faces might a clever and well traveled man have readily available within his mind? Five hundred? A thousand? Imagine commissioning a surgeon to re-arrange all of a patient’s blood veins such that they spelled out words on his limbs but did not otherwise hamper his flow of blood.

Only that analogy seems to understate how difficult the task would be.

Whoever architected his amnesia eschewed much cheaper and more direct attacks in order to do something very, very intricate. They wanted him precisely as he is, whole and fluent and energetic and deadly, but without the support of any friends or allies, and also deprived of the ability to prepare his most important weapons.

His breathing catches.

He has to effortfully pull himself back from the brink, lest he, for the second time today, begin to doubt the very nature of external reality and his relation to it. For the sheer volume of antagonistic power that now seems leveled at him permits of acts on the order of faking Sigil itself, of populating it with polymorphed demons, and staking him in their midst to be tormented in a grand pageant of bear-baiting.

He continues ruminating on the puzzle, awaiting any chance new insights, as he moves towards the Mortuary.

Leaving Flint Court, he again enters territory that is more squalid. The density of structures remains the same, but their quality and the volume of foot traffic diminish. Also, the number of young men openly sizing him up has increased.

After some time though, by merely keeping to the larger and busier streets, he comes without incident to a plaza adjacent to the giant stone edifice of the dustmen’s Mortuary hall.

He passes two dustmen walking the other direction, but neither seems to recognize him.

He eventually reaches the tea house and, shortly thereafter, the place behind the barrels where he left Morte.

The skull is nowhere to be seen.

Are the dustman’s cloak and rag still lying where he left them? Are they visibly disturbed?

Yes and no.

How’s the light? What time of day is it?

It is late afternoon. The light of peak has not yet diminished noticeably.

Then he has a window to search for Morte.

He’ll have to leave himself some time to find accommodations, especially if the local inns have curfews and lock their doors. Presumably the whorehouse district to the south will have no shortage of short-term lodging choices available at all hours, though they might run dear.

He’ll start by searching outdoors in the area around the alley… one hundred yards radius. Does he see Morte anywhere out among the public?

No.

Okay then.

If he gives an hour to the search, he judges he’ll be able to explore the neighborhood quite thoroughly. Beginning with the buildings directly on either side of the alley, he will briefly enter any structures that appear to be open to the public and look about. Does he find Morte?

The structures here mostly have shared elevated wooden frontages or balconies, and they seem to lean backwards from the streets, which are muddy and unkempt.

Most of the shops are not particularly inviting. The facade of one of the nicer ones he passes has a sign printed with the image of the Queen of Clovers playing card, with two words neatly stenciled below:

TAPROOM

CABARET

The outer door is a kind of iron gate contrived to descend from the ceiling, and behind it is a set of decorative wooden doors in the batwing style. The entrance passage makes two swift turns before opening up to a long and narrow interior.

There is a small stage in the back corner with a pianoforte pushed off to the side, and on it stands a colorless looking young man loudly declaiming poetical verse.