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“Could be. I awoke in the Mortuary surrounded by corpses.
I've heard you're the one who found me.”
After squinting hard at The Nameless One for several seconds, he brings a hand to his forehead and wipes back his hair.
“You’re not a vessel,” he says finally.
He shakes his head. “Weren’t a breath of life in you neither. Checked that while I was scrubbing at the blood.”
He glances at the dog. Is he going to have to lose a finger gouging out that thing’s eyes?
This calls for an open bearing, something placating, but not daunted.
He turns both palms upwards, arms staying low at his sides.
Meanwhile his mind races to piece together a model of this tobacconist that coheres even a little. 1) Gathers corpses off the street and sells them to be raised as slavish automata. 2) Loves his dog. 3) Chatty shopkeeper. 4) Endearingly disheveled appearance… perhaps developed as a strategy to put others at ease and to lower their guard.
He starts with a tone mildly paternalistic. “Believe me when I tell you that I don't want it either.”
Time’s ticking.
Start with what won't work: definitely not an appeal to mercy or compassion for a stranger.
Snippets of language flash across his mental landscape:
- -- Speaking to you as a man, I tell you that --
- -- The thing that walked abroad last night and will do so again --
- -- Picking up even a small trinket from that place, you would be marked for slaughter by a great evil --
- -- For hive dwellers to walk about unmolested or make a purchase --
“You seem duly shocked to see me alive and walking. Let that proof stand as a measure of the size of the thing into which you have stumbled.
The reason I have come here is to limit the harm of events already set in motion by my enemies. Those enemies possess a sorcery and power on par with that of The Lady herself.” He speaks the name casually, without the reflexive fearful look about him that he has seen accompany such an invocation by other Sigil dwellers.
“Through no failure of your own you may have already got yourself more deeply tangled up in this matter than you realize. That's what we must determine, now, before the light of peak fades. The task before us is to extricate you as rapidly and safely as we can.”
He'll pause and look for any kind of tell. He doesn't trust this man.
Something seems to have dropped from the tobacconist's face. The schmaltz is gone.
“What enemies?” he says levelly.
There are pathways and gambles here.
Task: persuade a man you are expert in a subject where he has firsthand knowledge and you do not.
“Last night, something powerful waylaid me from the shadows. It struck me with a sufficiently great Art to shatter my mind and destroy the better part of my life's memories.
Because of the higher powers that sponsor me, the attack was not fatal, though it certainly would have been for any mortal man. I have fewer resources now than I would like, and I will take days to fully recover them. Some of the knowledge of the enemy has been lost. What I have retained is that the thing is highly mobile, that it does not hesitate to kill, that it fears no law nor maze nor locked door in Sigil, and that it has the capacity to place a mark on a victim such that it can find them wherever they flee, anywhere across the planes.”
He pauses. “It's possible that acting as you have, you have already been so marked. I do not begrudge you moving my body, but speaking to you now bluntly, I tell you that the length of your own lifespan may well depend on you communicating to me precisely where you went, what you did, what you touched, and what you saw from the moment you first encountered me.”
The tobacconist steps to the shop’s window and looks out at the street traffic, narrowing his eyes as if searching for pursuing fiends.
“You a wizard?”
He does a quick double take at that, evidently finding something off about the answer.
In a more cautious tone, “And this thing has its mark on you? And it follows you still?”
“I have been marked, yes. Though I do not expect an encounter in the daylight.”
He pauses.
“It can mark many at once… In the past it has struck down others in between encounters with me.”
He holds one arm out and uses his opposite hand’s index finger to trace a prominent scar from the forearm through the bicep. “I am resistant to any cut or strike. A blow will pierce the skin, but I will recover very quickly.”
Earlier this man said, what, something about scrubbing blood?
“The total destruction of my limbs might require as long as a day for me to wholly recover.”
Wait. Blast. How long was his body in the keeping of this tobacconist?
“I will say only that I have not killed it yet, though I have thwarted it in some of its desires, and that it has not killed me yet.”
The man nods.
His gaze returns to his shop's window. “And your enemy is shaped like a man.” The inflection is halfway between a statement and a question.
“If it so chooses. There is useful information in that, in the shell that you perceived it to wear.”
He looks into the man’s eyes for a few seconds without speaking. “I see that you are shrewd. I have been forthright with you. Will you speak freely now?”
“Forthright, eh?” The tobacconist makes a slight, wry smile.
He walks over to his hound and squats to scratch its head behind the ears. With his other hand he pushes back his hair again.
His voice recovers some of its lilt. “Oh, there isn't so much to tell, all things considered. Any mischief done was already done when I found you.”
He opens with a defensive claim, does he.
"Tell it to me as a story, from the beginning. Leave out no details, no matter how trivial."
“The start of it is I was out collecting. Me and my man. He just got in from the outers, and we left here at first light.”
The tobacconist’s eyes soften as he continues to speak.
“Had enough bodies already, in the yard, to make it more than worth the while. Five of them. But I had the bell out all the same. There'll be some alms houses who'll leave their deaders on a stoop for any collector to take, and others'll have a night man call out to a body wagon if he hears it pass, so checking first thing in the morning is wise.”
“Anyways, we picked up two more deaders from the treadmills in Ginny. And we were past the streets where we’re liable to find any more, but we kept moving with the clappers out and making a racket. Somewhere along the way we heard a whistle from a boy child. An urchin. He came running right up and told us he’d seen a ripe body nearby, and would lead us there in exchange of coins.
“My man shook him down a bit and flashed a blade to see if he was keen to lead us into some dodge, and concluded in short order that he was earnest. Truthfully he seemed quite shook up about it. But as the lad was a milk sop, seventy pounds wet if he was a pound and with a rabbity look to him, I didn't think much of it.”
He exhales forcefully, and the hound nuzzles his hand.
“It was a hateful place. Foul, and I know foulness. The reek of a corpse bowel, that’ll set you staggering. Or the smell of an inner bleed in the guts. I know those well - "