He raises and slowly moves his left knee over her lower body and down to the pavement on the other side, straddling her.

Then with his weight on that knee he lifts his right hand and matches it to his left, grasping Annah's wrist. He swaps hands.

He brings his left hand over to the ground on the other side of her, not touching her outstretched right hand.

“Look at me.”

She raises her chin up to meet his eyes.  

Her pupils are visibly enlarged, and within her glance are the looks of a thousand female ancestors.

He studies her appraisingly for a few moments. 

He allows his breath and his heart rate to calm, and he runs a few calculations.

Then he speaks very slowly.  

“Listen.”

“If I find that you have hindered the passage of me or mine through this place in the future, I will seek you out.”

“I will consider the effort to do so worthwhile because you have already inconvenienced me and caused me pain. I will make the experience of being found by me worse than anything you have known in your life on these streets.”

“I will peel off your finger nails one at a time. I will defecate into your mouth and then gag you with a rag that you cannot untie. I will dig up pieces of graveyard corpse flesh then thrust them up into your nethers, and I will leave them there until your insides pucker and swell, and your entire body becomes nothing but an overflowing cistern of corruption.”

He pauses a moment to let the words sink in.

“The lives and property of your companions I claim by right of strength and of self defense. I acknowledge no debt to you.”

He looks at her without speaking for a few seconds longer and then smiles.

“You may reclaim your knife. Now leave.”

He eases the downward pressure he's been applying, allowing Annah to retract her hand.

She flexes the hand, then rolls quickly to the side and seizes her knife.

In following the swiftness of her movement, her rodent’s tail coils and whips The Nameless One across the face.

She picks herself up and retreats several paces into the courtyard.  Then she stops and turns to face him.  She extends her arm down beside her thigh, fingers wide, seeming to be struggling to make up her mind.

Eventually, she scowls at The Nameless One, turns and flees.

The Nameless One stands and rolls his shoulders. He retrieves the scalpel again and stows it.

Then he slings the battle axe over his shoulder and proceeds out the far end of the alley heading towards Flint Court.

Mortals who have boarded within Sigil for a year or more often refer to one another as “cagers”, as in “residents of the birdcage”, to distinguish themselves from the “outers”, the travelers who stop over only briefly for one purpose or another.

The distinction between cager and outer is considered vital within the taverns and coffee houses and street bazaars of the birdcage because of the diverse ways there are to come to grievous bodily harm on short notice.  Within the rhythm of a normal conversation, an errand trip, or a ramble through the city’s pleasure districts, cagers might communicate to one another with knowing looks or a sudden change of intonation an urgent message: to disengage and be elsewhere promptly.  Often within those signals is an implicit plan to allow whatever outers are nearby to absorb the brunt of the danger.

But the opportunities for gain are commensurate with the city’s dangers.  Indeed, an outside observer might conclude from the twin facts of the city’s many centuries long tenure and its unabatedly high mortality that some truly lucrative commercial opportunity must exist to justify the whole degenerate mess. 

The cagers who prosper most here cultivate within themselves a mix of a ready eye for profit and a studied indifference towards strange occurrences, creatures, architectural features, noises in the night, and unattended Sigil gate portals.

Case in point, a few miles west of where the Nameless One had his encounter with street thugs, a line of mud huts, topped with composite geodesic domes of many individual panes of glass, stands beside a popular thoroughfare that wends between two of the borough’s larger tenement buildings.  Each day, cagers with barrows, hand carts, or heavy packs walk to and from Squares market and pass within a few feet of these structures.

The huts have a foul smell, and they appear to be many decades, if not centuries old.  And that is as much as ninety-nine passersby out of one hundred will ever think about them.

But at peak, the light of Sigil’s hazy celestial atmosphere shines down upon those domes, and, diminished only slightly, passes first through the interiors of the huts and then through a gash in The Hive’s stone and soil crust into a cavernous labyrinth many stories deep.

The air in this part of the Undersigil is noxious.  The cavern sprawls with dozens of conical mounds of food waste and miscellaneous trash, sourced and fed by a bewildering mix of metallic chutes and sluices and pipes that crowd the ceiling and spiderweb their way through the cavern, often disappearing into the shear walls to connect with other parts of the Undersigil.  Some mounds have no metal orifice above them, but are instead fed periodically by the opening of Sigil portals that dump fresh offal onto them.

The floor of the cavern is slick and punctuated with precisely circular shafts that open blackly downwards into much deeper caverns.  If one is quiet, and if there are no fresh deliveries of wet refuse onto the trash heaps to crowd out the auditory landscape, one can dimly hear the ponderous grinding of engines or machines far below.

Among the wastes of this cavern an old man carefully treads his path, favoring one leg and leaning upon a walking stick.  His face shows both weariness and a total lack of regard for the overpowering sordid stench of the place.  His posture is erect.  He steps over a puddle and pauses when he hears the heavy thump of something landing on or near a trash mound behind him.

He can tell instantly that the sound does not match that of a garbage bin’s contents being unleashed from above.  Whatever the source of the noise it is heavy, and rather dry for Sigil trash.

The man spins quickly on the heel of his good leg and scans the area.  It must be something coming from behind that mound there.

He takes two steps forward and then stops.  He spies a pale foot and ankle visible around the side of that mound.  The old man narrows his eyes.

There is the sound of a second thump, similar to the first and coming from the same place.

The man raises his hand and mutters something under his breath while making a few precise, cabalistic motions.  After a moment, his whole body takes on a shimmer.  An observer might describe the result as many ghostly images of the same man, occupying similar but not exactly identical spaces and each commanding a slightly different posture and position of limbs.

"Daughter?"

It looks to be around the time of lunch hour.

He makes good on his plan of greeting pedestrians and inquiring for Flint Court. Once there, he starts asking around for a tobacconist who owns a shop in this neighborhood with a yard.

His cover story, should he need one, is either 1) He is a courier tasked with picking up an order from the man or 2) He had some excellent Bytopian shag in a pub near Clapper and is seeking out the source. The former is a better default for merchants and the latter for tramps.

How long does it take to turn up a decent lead?

The Nameless One struggles to get positive responses while walking around in a bloodstained vest and brandishing a battle axe.  If he persists and doesn’t have any run-ins with the Harmonium, he’ll eventually end up squarely in the heart of Flint Court.

After a handful of false starts, he comes across this half-sized unfortunate drinking from a stable trough with a clay bowl.

He approaches the man and lays the axe down gently a few yards from the trough.

Stooping to untie and retie his bootlace he says, “Hail, old timer.”

He raises the bowl above his head and lets the water fall over his long hair.

He seems equally content to drink the standing water or use it to make his toilet.  “Hail yourself.  Ain’t no old timer.”