As he’s about to move past the pipe, something shoots out in front of him at knee height, ejected from the rear of the cart.  It is hard to tell whether it is an intricate mechanical contraption or something of the Art.  It has a matte black color and rigid joints. It looks like a metallic insect appendage.

The thing unfurls under the release of some springlike tension.  It first touches the ground and then rebounds, fanning upwards and forming into a large drying rack, with many hangers upon it in a thicket of different shapes.

When it finally stops moving, its expanded form occupies most but not all of the space available to exit the alcove.

He flattens himself against the wall and carefully edges his way out into the street.

The old woman remains with her back turned to him, chuckling softly as she works her fingers through a knot in the crusty leather strings that bind the washboard to the cart.

Sigil is a strange place. 

He walks east for about ten minutes. What does he see?

The broad avenue he set out upon soon gives way to a tangle of structures that might have been dropped from the sky onto a stony field in groups of two or three, such is their order.  The Nameless One finds he needs to make frequent turns, and he often ends up in cul-de-sacs.  Prostitutes and street children beckon and make promises and entreaties of various sorts.  Whatever drainage operates in Sigil seems to operate less so here, as the streets are often lined with gutters of brackish rainwater and occasionally outright sewage.

After following a route with no passages to left or right and few signs of commerce for a quarter mile or so, the street narrows further through an arched gate.  

At the gate stand three men in full plate.  Their helmets are topped with a great semicircular crest running left-right, and they are armed.

Beside them, standing with head bowed slightly in deference, is a dustman.

A checkpoint. That’s not Harmonium gear. What other factions are plausibly active here? Godsmen? Mercykillers?

He’ll turn immediately to his left and approach the nearest structure as if to enter it. After miming the gesture of rapping the door with his fist, but terminating the blow short and making no noise, he glances first left, then right, to gauge whether the checkpoint has taken an interest in him.

The guards do not react.

Good. If Sigil is two leagues in width as Morte said, the entire meridian can’t possibly be watched. He will double back, hugging the right wall and preferring to move north-northeast where he can.

Using the mazer’s right-hand rule takes him down quite a few detours as he works his way westward.

Eventually he reaches a spot that shows boards tacked together in the characteristic fashion of the Lady’s dabus, closing off a section of Sigil.  Whether the locals took this wall down or the dabus gave the wall up for a duty more pressing is uncertain, but the wall is decidedly unfinished.

A few flimsy planks extend into the gap, but behind the barrier a street runs northward, about as broad as any in this part of Sigil.

He’ll take the passage and move quickly. 

He’s mindful of how much time he is taking and whether the dusties will make the same inferences he has and send someone after the tobacconist for more info on the man who invaded their mortuary.

There are no pedestrians in this area.  The architecture abruptly changes a few hundred feet into the passage, becoming homes that seem decidedly more middle class than their surroundings.  The buildings are mostly brick.  There are mild stonework flourishes on the window lintels.

The street ends with a few hitching posts and an elevated curb of brickwork above the base level of stone in Sigil.  There is an alley barely large enough for two to pass that continues northward.

Affirmative. 

He picks up his pace and continues down the alley.

After fifty paces or so the left wall falls away from him, opening up to a rectangular courtyard.  The space is lined with two story dwellings, some having balconies with iron railings.  On the opposite corner of the courtyard, the alley way continues onwards. 

The courtyard is full of debris.  There are scattered pieces of furniture, lumpy divan couches stuffed with something coarse and fibrous that spills out from holes in the fabric, and pieces of a bedframe.  He also sees various wooden crates and tapped kegs, and evidence of a cooking fire.  There are piles of wood scraps and a broken piano, but enough of a clear path exists to suggest foot traffic at least occasionally passes this way.  There are no people present.

He does a quick check for any obvious tripwire or the like and proceeds through the courtyard through the passage at the far end.

As he passes a stack of crates he sees in the space behind it a rippling shimmer of a vertical plane.  It appears to be bounded by the outer edges of a large crate made of palette wood, standing on its side about five feet high.

It is one of Sigil's portal doors, perhaps whimsically opened by the Lady in a pile of trash.

Nope.

No adventures till he's met the tobacconist. Through the courtyard. Into the passage at the far end.

As he steps into the narrow passage at the end of the courtyard, he hears a voice behind him. 

“Hey mister.”

No good conversation ever starts in an alleyway. He keeps stepping quickly but will glance over his shoulder to size up the threat.

It’s a short man with a wiry frame.  

It seems he was sitting stationary behind one of the crates, for he is only just rising.  His hair is nappy and orange in a way that suggests artificial coloring.

The alley into which The Nameless One has entered is just barely large enough for two men to pass side by side.  Before he can flee much farther, a second figure emerges to block his path, stepping out of the shadow of a doorway stoop. 

This man is much larger, as tall as The Nameless One, but looking to be maybe four stone heavier.  He’s holding some kind of a battle axe with a cutting arc on one side of its head and a nasty looking spike on the other.

“Easy friend.  Slow down and talk.”  The voice is slower with a touch that makes The Nameless One wonder if the man is simple.

He stops and orients himself sideways relative to the two assailants, back to the solid wall.

He draws the scalpel from the loincloth with his dominant hand. He's positioned maybe three or four paces into the alley from the courtyard. If there are more of the gang planning to join in this attack he doesn't want to get outflanked.

The first man speaks again, approaching slowly with both hands raised in a calming gesture.

“That’s what I’m saying. Keep it slow.  Keep it simple, mister.  You’re walking known ground.  This is a known situation.  It is solved, see?”

He makes his face perfectly neutral. He looks at the smaller man briefly, then returns his gaze to the large one.  

No weapon drawn by the small one… and he trusts his own reflexes to be able to avoid any swing from that weapon.

He’ll wait out the one who is talking. He doesn’t see any advantage in speak first.

“There, there now.  No brains spilled on the floor.  No blood.  No guts.  Those don’t do us any good.  Let’s do introductions.

"I’m Landers.  And this corner of The Hive is in our keeping.  What’s your name?”

Can superstition work here?  Or should it just be brutality.

Anyone who lives long in Sigil has seen at least one strange and powerful being. Queer is good in this city. It begets caution, and respect, so as long as it's not transparently being queer for queerness’ sake.

He'll try a gambit,  and slay them all if it fails.

“This body has no name.”