Two men are pulling a cart laden with corpses across the courtyard of a massive stone building.  

The cart and its cargo, the bodies of at least half a dozen transients in various states of damage and putrefaction, are heavy enough that the two men move slowly, breathing audibly and not speaking to one another. They draw the cart through an open side door of the building and down a hallway of arched passages.  Near its end, they turn into an alcove with a grated iron floor. The first man spits into his hands before stooping down to grasp a mounted winch.  With jerking, uneven motion, he lowers the platform on which they stand to a deeper basement level.

They emerge from the shaft into a large room, easily fifty paces in either direction.  There are no windows, and what scant light there is comes from hanging lanterns.

The space is studded with flat stone tables placed at regular intervals like the nodes of a grid.  Naked corpses lie supine on three of them. Standing upright before one of the tables is what appears to be a sentient, decomposing female corpse, presently engaged in passing a needle and thread through the abdomen of the body lying before her.  

None of the other bodies, the ones lying on the tables, are moving.  

Cupboards and bookcases line three of the room's exterior walls.  Mounted to the fourth is a thin cage of iron bars running half the length of the room, and contained within it is a hovering, barrel-sized human skull.  The skull emanates a faint, pale light from its surface, and it bobs up and down as it paces - or drifts - back and forth.

None of this seems to surprise the two men.  They avoid gazing at the corpse woman and the skull and they maneuver their cart to the nearest unoccupied slab.  As they unload, they handle the bodies in a manner neither reverent nor malicious.  They ensure that each ends face upwards, but they make no effort to align all the heads in the same direction nor to prevent a limb or two from hanging off the side of a slab.

Near the bottom of the foul smelling pile on their cart, they uncover a body heavier and evidently better fed than the others.  It is a large man, well over six foot and built like a gymnast. His skin has a gray tinge and is thoroughly covered in scars and tattoos.  The extent of the ink is visible on a body naked save for a loincloth fastened with a studded belt.  The largest of the tattoos forms a pattern of what might be stylized chain links or a thicket of brambles, and it wraps his upper back and curves around to the front of his shoulders.

The two cartiers struggle to lift him on their first attempt, but with a few stifled oaths and a repositioning of leg and back, they get him onto a slab. 

After unloading the last of the bodies, they return to the elevator with their cart and depart without speaking.

For several minutes the upright female corpse continues to suture clumsily.  A faint wheezing sound emanates from her at intervals, but the room is otherwise silent. 

The skull in the cage continues to pace. The corpse woman finishes her task by tying a knot with a few dozen superfluous loops and then biting off the end of the thread.  She then returns to the side cupboards to retrieve a sharp tool and a basin.  She moves to the next corpse and uses the tool to make a vertical incision from sternum to groin, before reaching her bare hand inside and beginning to methodically tear out the viscera. 

An intense heightening of the room's putrescent odor ensues, for anyone present with functional olfactory senses.

The gray-skinned man on the slab grimaces and twists his neck back and to the side, wincing and recoiling as if avoiding a blow. He opens his eyes.

He stares vacantly for several seconds, his eyes narrowed in concentration. Then he pushes himself up to a seated position.

The skull pauses in its motion and regards him.   It moves to the point in its cage nearest to him, about five yards away. 

It makes a scolding, tsk tsk tsk sound before speaking aloud. “And just when you think you’ve finally hit the bottom, you find a trapdoor and discover a whole new layer of hell."

The man turns abruptly.  By the lantern light of the room, Morte can see his eyes make a rapid succession of movements.  They dart between the talking skull, the length of the bars encasing it, the corpse woman, the doorway to the cargo elevator and another archway leading to a staircase on the opposite wall.

"What is this place?"  His voice is deep and raw sounding, as if it causes him pain to use his vocal chords.

"Eh.  More or less what it looks like.  It's a morgue."

He slowly swings his feet off the slab and brings them to the ground. Bracing his palms on the stone surface for support, he stands.

He raises his voice to carry across the room, "You there!  Attendant. Do you speak?"

For the moment she does not.  Nor does she appear to have heard him.  She is now wiping down the abdominal cavity of the corpse before her with a sponge.

"Might want to keep your voice down there, chief.   Not that I haven't taken an interest in that sheila myself.  It's the eyes that do it for me.  But if you're brought here, it means the dusties paid good jink for you.  They probably wouldn’t take kindly to one of their vessels up and springing the coop."

He takes a few preliminary steps, pauses, does a partial squat. His right knee pops audibly.

His body feels stiff but fully functional.

His mind… does not feel right.He has either suffered a head injury or else he’s under some kind of powerful drug or magic spell. His sense of self and of reality is so palpably incomplete. How did he come to be incapacitated?  What is his most recent memory? What day is it? Actually, what year is it, even?

As the seconds pass, he notices an interior mental voice speaking with increasing insistence, making itself heard even as his attention reels from one chain of broken inferences - suddenly hiccuping and stopping- to the next.

WEAPONS, the voice says. 

ALLIES.  EXIT STRATEGY.

He approaches the skull, staying a few paces back from the bars. "You’re being held against your will?"

"Me?  I can leave any time I want.  Only I think I must've left my keys in my coat pocket.  Ever hear of a Mimir?"

"Sorry."

He pauses, shakes his head clear.

"Wait a moment.” He gestures to the corpse woman. “Will she sound an alarm if I move about?

"The sheila? Eh, she may start embalming you if you hold still too long, but I wouldn't exactly call her a threat."

"Good."

He walks to the wall cupboards and attempts to open them. What does he find?

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.  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?"

“Way I came in is the cargo platform in that corner.  It’s noisy as hell though.  Haven’t been up the staircase yonder.”

He works his hand through the cage at about chest level, palm upwards, and brings his torso flush with the bars. He lowers into a squat and prepares to drive his body upwards, forcing the horizontal piece of bar with it. He takes a deep breath and pushes.

How does it go?

The bar starts to bend upwards.  Given his strength, if he’s willing to bruise his palm a bit he can detach the horizontal spur from its adjacent vertical pieces and drive it upwards until it meets the next span above.  This will give him a new rectangular-ish space of around 3”x6”, and deform the adjacent links a bit to boot.

He uses the sleeves of his robe to alleviate the pressure on his bare palm and repeats the same procedure for the 3 horizontal spans to either side of that one. And then he starts working his way above and below that bar to make a Morte-sized hole.

It’s going to take ten minutes or so, but it proceeds uneventfully.  

The last few were pretty easy as this horizontal span has largely separated from the vertical pieces.  Evidently this structure was not built to contain a large athletic male.

"Can you pass this?"

With The Nameless One holding his robe against the jagged bars to soften the passage, Morte is able to squeeze through.

"Stay close behind me and do not speak unless you have to."

He draws the robe's hood over his head and pulls it forward, shading his face. Then he walks back to the wall cupboard and draws forth a set of rags to tie around his head underneath the hood, hiding everything below the line of his eyes.

Then he pulls his robe's belt tight and makes for the staircase.

He is feeling the time pressure now, almost palpably.

The different impressions he's experienced since waking are beginning to coalesce and to point inevitably towards two conclusions: First, that he was until recently a powerful actor in the world, and second, that his agency has been dealt a crippling blow by someone or something.

From that it follows that his current entrapment within an unknown basement, urgent as it is, is not his largest concern. The greater threat is that someone has acted and is continuing to act against him, now with far greater knowledge than he has.

Where are they now? Maybe raiding a cache of his goods or slaughtering his extended family.

He poses the question to himself: If I look back at this time later, what is it that I will regret not having done?

As he approaches the staircase, suddenly he feels the air chill around him.  He experiences the sensation of a muffling or muting, almost as if he is now hearing the sounds of his own footfalls from underwater.  What does he do in the next three seconds?

Stop walking and raise his arms slightly, preparing to defend against any incoming blow.

Before him, the form of a spectral woman emerges from the doorway to the stairs.  She is leaning forward, at an angle, as if standing on a surface aligned at a tilt from the floor, and her body appears to terminate abruptly below the shoulders in a perfectly vertical plane.  Her shoulders are bare, and she wears a gown of some kind.  She looks like a courtesan.

Her image is translucent, tinged blue, and she wears an expression of deep grief.

To Morte’s eyes, The Nameless One stops suddenly in his movements and stares at the doorway in alarm.  There is no woman present.

The spirit speaks, "Is it only now that you have found your way back, my love?"

He stops abruptly and regards her, his hands contracting a fraction as if in readiness to swing a fist. "Greetings. Do you know me, spirit?"

She inhales a sharp breath. 

"Could it be that the fates have ripped even me from your mind?  Every inch of you, love."

"Forgive me lady. But I do not know you. If it is that you know me, then tell me, what is my name?"

Without noticing it, he is speaking more loudly than he spoke to Morte, compensating for the strange dampening quality of his senses.

"Err.  Chief?"

"A test?  Adahn, you called yourself to me first, though I know you wore many names."

"Thank you, spirit. I would speak to know you further. However I am in some danger and must be brief. I wish you to demonstrate that you know me as a man in particular and are not merely a shade bound to this sepulcher at the time of your death. First, who are you that knows me as Adahn?"

Volume still loud.

"Danger?" The voice is both wistful and ragged.  

"Tell me what threatens you, dearest.  I will obey you as I always have."

"Well.”

He pauses a moment.

“I may have been imprisoned or kidnapped. I was transported to this place without my leave. I cannot recall anything concerning who I am or who my friends are. If you have any aid to offer, I would accept it with gratitude. Please, spirit, what is your name?”

"Deionarra."

"Deionarra. Do you know where it is you now stand?"

“At the threshold of darkness, my love.  And of regret.  Where you left me.”

To Morte’s senses, there is the sound of footfalls approaching from above.  

He rams his skull's body lightly into The Nameless One, hard enough that a smaller man would likely lose his balance, were he not expecting the blow.

“Hey!”  He whispers.

He regards Morte for a moment and raises an eyebrow.

“Do you not see her?”

Then he turns back to Deionarra. He absorbs the gist of Morte's urgency.

“Please, Deionarra. Name to me the place you are in right now. If you can do so I will take what action I can to ease your suffering. The consequences of this moment to both of us may be very grave. Speak now!” He puts as much command into his voice as he can.

The sound of footfalls quiets, then continues, proceeding with more stealth.

Morte quickly moves against the wall, a few paces back and in position to ambush anyone who crosses the doorway into the room.

Her vision snaps to look him in the eyes upon hearing his last sentence.  “A doorway,” she says quickly and softly.  “Lost, and surrounded by machines. Doors that open and close without reason, with the blind archer and the-”

And the spell is broken. 

The woman vanishes, and there is a robed man standing before him, three stairs up from the base of the arched doorway, holding a truncheon in one hand and a lantern in the other.

“Hold still and draw no arms,” he says.  “Who are you and why have you come here?”

The man raises his lantern to cast light upon The Nameless One's face.  Upon seeing the bandana obscuring the face, he calls out loudly, "Eckhert!"

Not a good sign if he intends to escape with Morte. He should act.

The dustman has about two feet of elevation on him, standing on the stairs. But taking a blow from a cudgel is unlikely to incapacitate him so long as he protects his head.

He leaps into the dustman's waist in a tackle. He positions his own head to the right, underneath the lantern hand. He prepares mentally for a blow to his backside.

The two men fall into the staircase,  with the Dustman landing a hit on The Nameless One's shoulder. 

It strikes with all the force of what a middle-aged man might dish out, caught off guard and in an awkward position.

He feels the blow but is not slowed by it. Upon hitting the stairs he'll push off the man to get leverage and bring his own right arm up to deliver a hook to the chin.

The action feels obvious and intuitive. It is accompanied by an expectation that his blow will incapacitate his adversary, or worse.

The dustman tries to push The Nameless One down with his left arm, but he is not able to stop the blow.  His head slumps against the stone stair and does not move.

“Morte! Come!” he says loudly. He gets to his feet.

He’ll stop long enough to deliver a hard kick to the man’s crotch before running up the stairs. What does he see?

A landing and more stairs leading upwards.

How many flights of stairs did he climb to get here?

One-and-a-half or two, by his reckoning.

He steps lightly into the landing.

Is there light? Is there any daylight?

He sees a hallway.  There is one hanging lantern maybe a dozen paces away.  He can hear the sound of voices above.

Then he'll run down the hallway. He wants to get as far from the basement as possible, keeping his eyes peeled for daylight in the form of windows or doors.

He will see many doors.  At the end of the hallway is a half flight of descending stairs leading to a large wooden double door.

He looks backwards over his shoulder.  Is Morte there?

Yes, visible in the dark by his skull's luminosity.  There is also the sound of a man's shout further up the hall.

He'll try the double doors.  Hopefully they are exterior doors.

As he begins to push them, gray morning light and a damp chill greet him.  The doors open into a walled courtyard.

The external walls are around fifty paces away, rising up ten feet or so, and made of stone.  There is a visibly closed iron gate.

He moves in the direction of the gate. He'll transition from running to striding briskly, now that he is in the open and still wearing a stolen robe.

What manner of gate is it? A portcullis descending from above? Or like an iron fence secured by a chain and lock? Is there a gatehouse door nearby?  Can he see a locking mechanism?

It looks to be a sideways swinging hinge door, set in an iron frame.  There is a thick chain currently securing one end of the door to the frame.

A small stone building abuts the courtyard wall beside the gate.  It has a darkened doorway, visibly open, and a dustman comes running out when The Nameless One is within fifteen paces of it.

Then he’ll raise his voice and assume the tone of an angry superior.

“There are thieves!” He thrusts his arm towards the gate.

“Why haven’t you closed the gate?”

He’ll keep walking towards the dustman.

The dustman spends about a second and a half turning to look at the visibly closed and locked gate and then turning back in alarm.

The Nameless One reaches the dustman and drives a fist into his gut.  He starts the motion as a continuation of the swing of his arms as he strides, waiting till the last instant to reveal his intent.

He catches the dustman as he reels, and shoves him backwards up against the wall of the gatehouse.

"Keys!" he shouts.

The dustman shakes his head from side to side and attempts to raise his arms to defend himself.

The Nameless One ignores the dustman's flailing and brings his own left forearm up to the man's neck, pushing up and inwards.

Without looking he reaches into his belt with his right hand to retrieve the scalpel. He raises it to within a few inches of the man's eye. 

He gives a quick look behind him for Morte.

He drops the pitch of his voice and shouts again.  "Where are the keys?"

Morte has made it out into the courtyard, with the double doors still open behind him.

As of yet there are no other dustmen in sight.

The gatekeeper's eyes go wide and he stills himself.

"Here," his voice rasps out, constricted by the pressure of the Nameless One's arm.

He fumbles in his robes and pulls out a ring with half a dozen large toothy keys.  This dustman is actually a lot smaller than the other.  Scarcely more than a boy.

He glances downwards.  He is not amused.

"Which one for the gate?" he roars.

"Here," he says again.  "Here."

His hands are shaking as he isolates a key with no apparent differentiating features.

He'll need to use both his hands to try the lock.  It's heavy, and the chains through which it passes are thick.

The gatekeeper turns and runs as soon as The Nameless One loosens his grip.  "Help!" he shouts.

The lock clicks and opens.

Two dustmen have stepped out from the building now.  One of them holds a crossbow.

"Morte!" he shouts.

He grabs the free end of the chain with both hands and pulls hard, freeing it from the bars of the gate.

He turns his back to the dustmen and hauls the gate open.  He'll hold it open for Morte and then follow.

Morte passes through the gate, suddenly moving more swiftly than he had inside the mortuary, and turns to the left, breaking line of sight with the dustmen.

As he passes through the gate, The Nameless One perceives a whistling sound, followed a moment later by the sensation of a stinging in his back.

They emerge into a plaza of dingy buildings.  There are push carts set up, and maybe a dozen pedestrians within view. Most are human, though there are a few recognizable tieflings.

The atmosphere gives the impression of an urban slum, extending for block after disorganized block in all directions.

One humanoid shape with radically different skin color appears to be floating in the air, akin to the hovering of Morte, while hammering a board against a partial wall that appears to be being constructed from scrap plywood.

Morte pauses and allows The Nameless One to overtake him.  Then he follows behind.

He can ignore the sting unless it begins to impede his motion. He keeps up his run, moving in the direction of greater density of people, trying to put several blocks between him and the mortuary, glancing behind him for Morte every after every turn he makes.

Morte seems fully able to match The Nameless One for speed, and lets slip no sound betraying effort or exertion.  He occasionally slows down to do a quick 360 degree spin, then speeds up to close the gap between them.

Once they've been moving 5 minutes or so, he slows his pace and works to control his breathing.  He feels his heart rate pounding with the effort.

His plan is to walk unobtrusively for a few blocks and then enter the first alley he encounters that appears deserted.

This one goes back maybe sixty yards and ends in a brick wall.

One side is the solid stone wall of a building.  The other is more like a series of wooden shacks, stacked end to end with occasional small gaps between them. 

There are some barrels stacked along the stone wall, and the alley looks wide enough to just barely accommodate The Nameless One standing with his arms spread, without touching either side.

He discards his robe behind the barrels and beckons Morte to join him, out of sight.

“All right. Health check. Are you injured? Fatigued?”

He reaches his hand behind his back and begins to feel gingerly for the place he was stung.

“My legs are a bit sore from all the running, but the fresh air’s sure a nice change of scene.”

He brings his hand back to find it wet with blood, though he felt no pain from the touch.

He spits into his hand and returns it behind his back, trying to size the contours of the wound.  He turns to the barrels to see if they happen to contain potable water.

“I am going to interpret that to mean you are less tired than I am.  How far were we followed?”

"That'll leave a scar.  Err.  I mean, thanks for taking the hit, chief."

And then, a few moments later. “Hold up.  You’ve got a regular sermon written on you.  Have you seen your backside?”

He attempts to look but can make out only the corner of a long paragraph of text near his hips from around his shoulder.  “Tattoos?”

“I’ll say.  Someone has given you a full list of instructions.   At least I think it’s written to you.  Hold still.  It's small.  

It says:

"I know you’re feeling lost and afraid right now, but you need to keep your head about you or else we’ll be halfway up the Styx with no paddle.  First things first, find your journal.  You'll see that your fingers remember how to open it, even if your mind has forgotten.  And if all else fails, find Pharod.  There's a lot that isn’t safe to be written here, but here’s the gist.  First, you are immortal.  No power I know of can fully destroy your body.  Second, while you need not fear death, nevertheless you are not safe.  You are being hunted by an enemy that can reliably find you and cause you immense harm.  Beware of shadows.  There are fates worse than death.  Sleep in no place beyond one day’s time.  Compel honesty where you can.  Move swiftly, and good luck."

"Well. That's something."

Immortal.

That's…That's without a doubt the wildest yarn he has ever heard.

So what is the purpose of that being written in a tattoo?  On his own backside.

He twists his neck, straining to see more of his lower back, and he confirms that the visible words match what Morte said.

Immortal?

He brings his hand back to where he felt the blood.  He moves his fingers more aggressively now, attempting to dig fingernails into flesh, to push until he feels pain and locates the wound.

But there is nothing.

Immortal.

Could he really have escaped death?  When all of his memories attest to a man desperately fixated on survival, paranoid and cautious and ruthless?

And can it be proven? Without intentionally taking his own life?

 And if so, the fact that the message exists at all is also hugely suggestive.

“The words sounds like they could have come from me… Words I might have chosen, I mean, though I do not remember having them inked. The Styx line feels off, but perhaps off in the sense that it might contain a hidden meaning. 

And it does imply that whatever happened to me was not unprecedented, or at least not unpredicted.”

He raises a hand to his chin and gazes at the ground.

"And the positioning of the tattoo.  Something I couldn’t find out about unless I had an ally with me, or was in a place of enough safety and leisure to see myself within a looking glass.”

“I am going to strip naked. I want you to tell me if there is any other text on my body.”

He drops his loincloth to the ground and steps out of it. He makes a thorough inspection of his own body from feet to shoulders, rotating each of his limbs sequentially.

The body as a whole is almost supernaturally well developed, maybe a wrestler or a circus strong man's body.  It is heavily scarred but has no current bruises or visible cuts. The forearms and chest appear to have suffered scores of attacks and injuries.

There are tattoos on the chest and upper arms, all of a single color, jet black, and invoking stylistic renditions of predators, felines and one image which his mind labels as “thunder bird” without eliciting any further details.  There are some runes that vaguely suggest the components of enchantment spells, though he's not confident that he was the one who designed or executed them.  

“I see the runes ‘here’ and ‘here’ and ‘here’.  Do you see anything else?”

“Let's see.  

“No other words.  There are some symbols in the left armpit and upper back, like the ones on the chest.”

"How likely do you think it is that I am immortal?"

"Uhhh. Truly immortal?

"Like you could take the Lady of Pain in an all out fight? Or walk the planes of fire and spit in Hades' face and walk away with your life?  Not a chance.  But you certainly look like someone who's been killed.  Lots of times."

He gives a half smile to that.

He picks up the loincloth and systematically examines it, looking for anything out of place. The note seems to suggest the journal is some kind of puzzle box. But if it were a thing of the Art, it might conceivably be even smaller than a pocketbook, perhaps a key tied to some trans-dimensional space.

He runs his finger over the bone studs of the belt. He lets his fingers absently move about each nodule, hoping to produce some effect.

But there is nothing. After a few minutes he gives up and puts the loincloth back on.

“I had hoped to find the journal spoken of on the tattoo. You told me that you have perfect recall. Tell me everything about the men and the cart. What they were wearing, what they were carrying. Tell me if any of them had any expensive pieces of clothing or jewelry since the last time you saw them. Tell me any items that were on the cart apart from the other bodies.”

Morte goes perfectly still for a few seconds.

"First man - grey haired, with whiskers. Had a cloth cap with a front brim, vest and sleeves.  No watch chain or kerchief.  Trousers dirty but without any tears.  Boots.  The vest I'd seen on him before, not the shirt.  Trousers hard to tell.

"Second man - wide brimmed hat, never seen before, but worn looking.  Age thirty-five to fifty.  Dark hair.  Bearded.  Thick cotton sleeves.  Tunic inside.  Trousers torn.  Partial tattoo visible on wrist.  No jewelry.  Looks like a roughneck.

"The cart had a bell.  I didn't see any gear on it."

"In the last thirty days, how many corpses did you witness being brought to the morgue and prepared in the manner I observed?"

"Twenty-six."

How many in the last six months?

"189. And a half"

"Explain."

"Gate man paid full for a corpse that was missing its legs.  And a good portion of the pelvis.  Ghoul feeding, I guess. 

"He got sacked."

"How many did you witness in the last three years?"

"Seven hundred sixty-eight."

"How many in the last two years?"

"Six hundred ninety-four"

"How many in the last thirty months?"

"Seven hundred sixty-eight."

"Where were you on this day of the month thirty-one months ago?"

"I couldn't tell you."

"Provide a list of things your binding prevents you from saying."

"I am not able to answer that.  Cut it out, will you?"

"Who is Pharod?"

"Not a key that opens any locks for me, chief.  Sorry."

“In all you’ve read and encountered, what are some creatures that are either known to dwell in the shadows or who excel at tracking their prey.”

"Let's see.  For starters, running through the Planar Parade A to Z...

• The Athar are skilled assassins and spies that are known to strike wizards from the darkness, nullifying their magic
• Cranium Rats keep to the shadows in the way that any vermin does, and they’re everywhere in Sigil, and enough of them might make an intelligence large enough to be a threat
• Darkweavers are giant venomous spiders supposedly from Shadowfell, and they always wait in positions of total darkness. You’re supposed to hit them with fire and light, in case you were wondering
• Mercykiller bloodhounds are humans trained to track prey across the planes. If something is tracking and hunting you, maybe they’re a good bet
• Trelons are big black beatles from one of the lower planes. Kind of like cranium rats, but stronger and stupider. Also, they don’t have the mind meld thing going on
• Vargouilles are little batlike things that are known to swarm in the Undersigil"

“My tattoo said ‘beware the shadows’ and ‘can hunt you reliably’ or some such, yes?

Taking that as the criteria... that would suggest... what? Either Athar or Mercykillers?  

You said you believed my body was likely picked up in an alleyway or a nearby gutter. Which of the creatures in your list are most likely to have been in Sigil and incapacitated me?”

“Hmmm.

The Athar were driven out of Sigil by the Harmonium quite a few decades ago.  They do have a ruined guild hall in D’Angles a few miles from here, but it’s nothing but a burned out hull.  No roof even, when I saw it.  Mercykillers in Sigil are mostly working the prison in Lady’s Ward.  That’s the faction name.  It’s only a tiny number of them that are trained bloodhounds, though, and neither Athar nor Mercykillers are exactly regular to see walking about the streets of Sigil.  Granted, if they are minions of something greater, maybe they could have arrived here to attack you.  I don’t see any of the others I listed, realistically.  Darkweavers are stationary.  They don’t hunt.”

“And how likely do you think it I was ambushed by Athars or Mercykillers? Greater or less than a coin flip?"

“Wouldn’t take any bets on it.”

He turns his head back and forth brusquely, calling to mind a horse shaking its mane.

“You asked.”

He nods. 

“I agree with you. The chief difficulty I see is that it doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense.

Consider. I am an immortal. I perceive the threat of becoming an amnesiac. I take the precaution of tattooing instructions upon my own person and of keeping a locked journal to bring me up to speed after the fact. I know at least something about the enemy that is pursuing me. Presumably I have taken other countermeasures against being ambushed.

Then, I am surprised and defeated, and I awaken not in a jail cell, but within a very weakly defended basement, stripped of my journal and abandoned by any allies I might have had, but in no other way inconvenienced.

If I were faced with an unkillable adversary, I can think of a few obvious things to try…"

He trails off, declining to state aloud for Morte how he'd have attacked an immortal.

Bury them alive. Plane Shift them to somewhere inhospitable. Lock them in irons and drop them in Carceri. Alternatively, use a non-violent approach. Recruit them. Bribe them. Mislead them into serving your interests. Mind control them. Explore vectors to permanently damage their mind so they could never be a threat again.

...

Ah. Yes.

Well, that should have been obvious from the moment he read the tattoo.

• Proposition 1 - You are immortal
• Proposition 2 - You awake as an amnesiac away from any friends or allies
• Inference - Your amnesia is the result of a deliberate attack against you by someone who knows that you are immortal and devises amnesia as a counter strategy against you

But it still feels queer. That clears up maybe one tenth of the confusion, only. It's not at all what he would have done, were he the adversary.

If the blood he felt on his back and the pain of being struck are any indication, his immortality is not any kind of inviolate iron-skin, but more like having a mortal man’s body with a deep commitment to repairing and reforming itself.

“No power I know of can fully destroy your body” said the tattoo.

Tasked with defeating the entity he believes himself to be, he would strike with overwhelming force from a distance, using a missile or heavy blow to the head. Then he would place the body in a vat of strong acid. He would procure a lead container in the shape of a coffin, solder it shut with all the skill and art of metalworking to resist great fluctuations of temperature and force, perhaps coat the thing in cement and rocks and irregular stucco to mask it, and then drop it overboard in deep ocean waters to spend eternity on the seafloor.

And if it’s that obvious to him given only a few moments to consider, then why wouldn’t it be obvious to a foe strong enough and clever enough to have defeated him?

What explanation leads to all that he has witnessed about him since waking? 

• Option a) His adversary is something so inhuman that it simply doesn’t think that way, or doesn’t care enough to finish the job of compromising him
• Option b) His amnesia was delivered indirectly and his opponent was not present to witness it. Maybe earlier-him knew of the technique, but not how it was delivered, and suddenly he steps upon a tripwire in an alleyway of Sigil somewhere and *BAM*. It hits him. COMPLICATION - then why wasn’t his journal more securely bound to his body to be found by him later? Why the warning of pursuit within the tattoo's message?
• Option c) Not only was his awakening in the mortuary anticipated and desired as an outcome by his adversary, but all the events that happen as a result, the choices and actions he is taking now, were predicted and judged to be, on balance, more desirable than merely binding him and imprisoning him thousands of layers down in an uninhabited bulge of The Abyss.
• Option c variant) The tattoo was not inked by himself but by his adversary. The note about never staying in one place more than a night is a ploy designed to prevent him from being found by friends who are searching him out using… some sort of lingering mark that his presence leaves on the terrain around him
• Option d) The amnesia was invoked by himself and not by the adversary, as a deliberate strategy. The adversary may or may not have known about the immortality, but did not predict the amnesia. Well, no. For this option to make sense assume the adversary did not know about the immortality. In this hypothetical, somehow he, the immortal, outfoxed himself and failed to find or keep the journal about his person after enacting the amnesia
• Option e) Something else he hasn’t thought of yet

Option D seems promising, in the way it was promising to think first that maybe his adversary struck him with the amnesia to bypass the immortality. Maybe deliberate amnesia is an attempt to break the pursuit? Perhaps the adversary was finding him based on the contents of his mind?

But then, again, why does the tattoo tell his future self to expect continued pursuit?

He's missing something.

“In any event, I see two threads to pull upon. One is extremely urgent, and one is not nearly so.

First, I ask that you describe where we stand within Sigil. And please situate us in reference to the Tower or the Hall of Speakers.”

“Right.  So, you know Sigil is ring-shaped, right?  We’re on the inside of the ring.  It's all held together by sorcery, and it’s maybe twenty miles by five miles  And by convention among mortals the long way around is east-west, with the Siege Tower door opening to the east, in the direction of the Sensorium.  And uh, what I meant is, it's twenty miles to wind up back where you started, if you walk in a straight line east-west.
 
"We’re maybe four miles west of the tower, and a mile or so north.  I’m not very good at distances.

“Sigil has five boroughs.  The Hive, where we're at, the Lower Ward, where the Siege Tower is, and then moving progressively east it’s Clerk’s Ward, where the law courts and many of the guildhalls are, Lady’s Ward, which houses some of the stronger beings and magics that run Sigil, and then Market Ward, which kind of overlaps Lady’s Ward east west a bit, but it’s mostly east and mostly south of it.  And, although every ward has markets, Market Ward has some of the biggest markets with efreets and the like.  And then if you go farther east eventually you hit The Hive, but there’s a lot of broken passages and mazes that look like normal streets but supposedly once you enter you can’t ever escape.  And then lastly there’s Undersigil, which isn’t really a borough but is its own thing.  Theoretically it runs underground throughout the whole city but in practice only has inhabitants in some sections.  That’s another place where you don’t want to go generally.  It contains a bunch of machines and refuse and who knows what else that keeps Sigil running.”

“Then, more locally, this area we just left is called Tarry Fields or the Mortuary.  You were largely running south, which is fine, as far as safe directions go.  We’re in the space between there and Clapper, where a lot of the bars and whorehouses of The Hive are.  West, north west of us is D’Angles.  Farther west and a bit to the south of that is Squares, the main market of The Hive.  West of Tarry Fields is Flophouse and west of both Flophouse and Squares Market is Ragpicker's Square.  Far north of us is where the Dabus make things uncertain with all the reworkings.  A lot of more exotic, things that scuttle and crawl up in that area.  Immediately north of the Mortuary is usually called Lookout, because there’s some elevation there towards the edge of the ring, and Gatehouse.  East of the Mortuary is Flint Court and south of that is Sighs.  Or maybe it’s WeTo.  I’m not sure how they call it. Near there is a giant nasty pit of filth called The Ditch, and that typically forms the boundary between The Hive and The Lower Wards.  And then farther east of The Ditch is the Tower.  And south of the Tower is generally just called the Lower Wards and north of that is called Factry, where the warehouses and the Godsmen’s foundry is.  Then east of the tower is the Clerk’s Ward and that’s where the Hall of Speakers is.”

"Thank you."

He closes his eyes to concentrate.

"Repeat everything you just said."

Morte does so.

He opens his eyes and picks up a stone. He makes a trial scratch on the stone wall beside the barrels.

It leaves a visible mark. He makes some hasty vertical and horizontal lines and then begins to fill in text.

"What corrections would you make to that?"

Morte tilts on his axis, leaning his forehead in the direction of the wall, as if squinting at the marks.

"The whole column with Sighs should shift up about half a square, and Gatehouse is more north of Lookout... but that's about right?"

“What sorts of records did you keep for the dustmen?”

“Contracts, payments, notes on particular stipulations for vessels to be constructed.  They usually train or shape them in the hall where they brought you, things like cleaning or carrying or splitting wood.  Sometimes it’s sewing or working in the manufactories.  I also track food and dry goods orders, and some land and property deeds held in the dustmen order’s name throughout the material plane.”

“Payments? How many different people have sold corpses to the dustmen? Do you have a list of all the names of body-vendors in the last several months?”

“So, I don’t know how much they track the sources of the bodies. You can probably imagine some good reasons for that, like if the law shows up at the door looking for the body of a murder victim.  Definitely a 'tell me no secrets and I'll tell no lies' kind of policy.

“What I do have is the committals.  There's a place between here and Sighs with a big ole wall full of names.  You promise the dusties can have your body when you die and make your mark in the records and then they brand a number on your hip and give you enough jink to get plastered on gutter spirits for a week.  Carve your name on the wall, too.”

“I've got notes on committals like ‘5th Hecatomb in the year 624, Oliver Painter, resident of Squares, adjacent Office of Vermin Control, forty-five years of age, for the sum of 125 copper commons, requisition number 34 B 19.  Status: Unredeemed’

“As far as paying for bodies at the door, I don't know how they track the petty cash.  At least they never showed me their general ledger or treasury master accounts.”

"Were the two men who brought me among the more common collectors or the rarer ones?"

“Ish.  Let's see.  A bit over half of the deaders I saw delivered were handled by dusties, usually on a wagon from the elevator room.  The remainder were by outsiders.  Most common one is a githyanki.  He brings corpses, though they’re never gith corpses, probably from outside of Sigil.  The others are mostly humans.  There’s a tiefling woman with a tail I’ve seen sometimes.  

The man with the cloth cap who brought you, yeah, he’s one of the more common ones for sure.”

“The older man? That’s the one in charge? What’s his name?”

“Couldn’t tell you.  He has brought in bodies alone before, though.”

His eyes have taken on a sudden intensity they lacked before.

“Apart from the wall with the names and the mortuary, where’s the nearest location to us that would have dustmen in attendance?”

"Erm.  I've heard them talk about a building they have in Flophouse, though I don't know how to find it."

"Give me the names and ranks of the dustmen in charge at the mortuary."

• Traff is the Abbot
• Dogar is the quartermaster
• Melvulum is the head of the guard

“Here?”

Morte does a quick 360 rotation.  He seems about to object, but then changes tack.

“I need to sleep like any creature.  If I don’t I may pass out, and it’s unpleasant.  I can be harmed or killed.  But I have fought before.  These chompers aren’t for show.  You ever see a berk bit by a flailing madman?  Like that, only with a jaw five times the size.”

"No need to eat, no."

"Tell me how to reach the wall with the names of the committed vessels."

He calculates for a bit.

“Four crossings back you walked by a tea house with grease paper windows.  Had a sign of a cuttlefish head.  If you had turned left there - so you’ll turn right this time, and stay on that street for a mile at most.  Eventually it should run straight into some kind of ruined mansion or work house.  Or there used to be one there, anyways.  No promises ‘cause Sigil.  Go right, then immediate left around the side of it.  On the opposite side is a big open square and that’s where the wall is.  Can’t miss it.  Taller ‘n you.  Made of granite.”

“Thank you.”

He turns to go.  

“You’ve been very helpful to me. I hope you will be here when I return.”

“Ay!  Wait a sec.”

"Yes?"

“Your left shoulder blade is covered in blood, and you look like an escaped barmy on a murder spree.

At least clean yourself up before you go gallivanting about in front of the Harmonium or Godsmen watch.”

He returns to the dustman’s robe and uses it to scrub his back with his right hand. He is thorough, and spends a solid minute.

“Good?”

“Uhhhh.  Sure.  Just… don’t go picking fights with any deities, ya ken?  And don’t get your brain box all amnesia’d again.”

"That's the plan."

He leaves the alleyway in the direction they entered it, retracing his steps back to the tea house.

The dustman's wall is a v-shaped formation of two perfectly rectangular stone segments, with a gap at their vertex where foot traffic can pass.  It stands rudely within the remnants of what must have been at one point a manicured public plaza.  A set of stairs rise from a dirt patch fostering a few scraggly trees, and on an elevated, stage-like protrusion of rock is a pedestal showcasing a statue of a great tiger, apparently being ridden by a humanoid.  The rider’s torso has been roughly cut or broken just above the hips, obscuring their species and sex.

Within the space framed by the V arms of the granite wall, the dustmen have erected a canvas or oilskin pavilion that stands on four posts.  The material is worn, and appropriately enough, dun-colored.

There is but one man in attendance wearing the characteristic robes of the order.  He stands in front of a table and speaks to a young man and woman, who look stern, and casually half-embrace one another.

He'll approach the wall to get a look at some of the names. Are they organized? Is there an index or gazetteer to distinguish by class, geography, or prominence of the person?

On closer inspection, the wall is made of many individual upright slabs, each about an arm’s span in width.  There are many carved names, and they are fairly evenly dispersed.  Maybe a quarter of the entire surface has been filled with text.

They appear to be the given and surnames of several hundreds or a few thousands of people.  The Nameless One’s eyes light upon the name “Bert Piledriver” at random.  He can see that the slabs are arranged by given name, with all the names on a stone starting with the same one or two letters.

There are no other markings or obvious indices to the names.  He can’t easily discern which names are older or newer.

He knows very few relevant people to look up.  He will look for the following names in order:

1. Pharod
2. Adahn
3. Deionarra
4. Morte

There is an Adonis Grainberry.  Of Mortimers there are three: Livingstone, Porter, and “Monger-of-Companion-pets”.  No other names seem like a plausible match.

A Dustman clears his throat loudly.  When The Nameless One turns about, he'll see a gaunt-faced man looking at him with some disdain.

“Are you here to commit?”

“Greetings. I was sent by Traff with a message, and to ask a question of you.”

The dustman raises an eyebrow and ostentatiously looks The Nameless One up and down.

“And was he unable to find any messengers with shoes?  Or who didn’t reek of the trash warrens?”

What's the right face to wear, here? This dustman looks like he might respond to obsequy and charm, had he himself come wearing finer attire. What’s an alternative route to compliance?

He grunts. Then, using a diction slower and more deliberate than he used with Morte, he says, “That’s so. If ‘twere only a message he’d have sent a boy, s'pose. Sent me on account of my trade. And that’s finding people what have run away, and bringing them back where they’re belonged, willing or no.”

He pauses and looks at the man in the eyes.

“I have a question for you. Both your abbot and I are in agreement that you should answer it.”

Wait. Mazes. He just witnessed me staring at a stone slab of text, and now I’m play-acting an illiterate tough.

“That - isn’t how it works at all.”

The dustman stares blankly at him.

The dustman sighs.

“And?”

“There was an attack made on your hall this morning. Villains was snuck in on a body wagon. Beat the gatekeeper to within an inch of his life and maybe kill’t another. Whole yard of the place in a state when I left it. ‘Who's done it?’ they all ask. ‘Two collectors. Men with a cart. Both wearing caps.’ is all anyone knows about them's brung in the thieves."

"Gate man isn’t fit to talk. It’s thought that the villains were from the Hive, and that you or yours here might recognize them, on account of speaking with the public. What do you know?”

He reacts to the news with a considerable degree of agitation.

“An attack? Why didn’t you start with that?  How should I know?  Briggs back at the Mortuary would know.  He has worked the front gate on occasion.  He’s known for dealing with commoners.  Ask him, or Eckhert.”

"Hey!"  He lowers the pitch of his voice.

"You think Traff’d send me here, Briggs knows? Your whole mortuary’s in a row and first thing your abbot does is send for me. He wants that any of the collectors that might have done it be found and brought in for questions, and done so today. That's what I'm t’be paid for.”

The man just shakes his head.

“Any other dusties work here?”

"No.”

He grimaces at the epithet.  

“Hmph. Barring that, Traff also wants the name and origins of anyone who’s hauled in corpses before.”

“Ask the skull.”

The Nameless One frowns.  

“‘Ask the skull.’ That’s what they already told me. Skull was taken in the attack. Seems nobody knows the chant without it. What collectors do you remember?”

He widens his eyes at that news.

“Not any that have passed by here recently.”

The dustman is quiet for some time.

“There’s a fat brown man who dresses like a Fated.  Might be from Clapper.  Never spoke to him.  A woman… want to say from Ragpicker’s.  Kind of half a harlot and half a basher.  Can’t recall her name.”

“Then there is the one in Flint Court, Grundsley or Langley or some such,  but I don’t think he’s your catch.  He’d be the most regular of any collectors working The Hive.  Tobacco merchant.  Known to keep a ripe pile of dead waifs and drunkards in his yard, or so they say.  Doesn’t figure he’d plan to do any thieving.”

He adds almost as an afterthought.  “But don’t put him in the book.  Don’t off him.  He’s been useful to us before.”

“No killing.”

He looks off into the street and grunts again.

“What others you know of?”

He shakes his head slowly.

“Cloth cap. Hair turning gray. Whiskers, maybe?”

His face brightens.  “Yes, that fits.  That's the man that did it?”

“So they told me.”

The Nameless One gives a curt nod and departs. “Thankee.”

If the dustman watches him carefully, he’ll find that The Nameless One turns in the wrong direction to be headed for Flint Court.

Outside, he walks a hundred yards or so to a place outside of the flow of traffic to orient himself.  He has only a few memories of the Hive, but he does remember much of Morte’s words.

Flint Court. Is there any place nearby he can stand outside of vision of passersby?

There’s actually quite a bit of foot traffic here.  It’s one of the wider streets, and there are even an occasional coach or cart being pulled by four legged creatures, despite Sigil’s famously deadly environment for beasts of burden and pets.

On one side of the street is a squat building of mud bricks that presents a rectangular alcove, falling back from the street.  It's maybe twice the size of a family dinner table.  The footprint of the recess is partially occupied with a large, vertical, cast-iron pipe, as thick as an adult pine tree, that rises up to the second story and then makes an abrupt elbow joint to hook into the building.  It must be part of Sigil’s inner architecture.

Sure. He’s not going to skulk behind the tube like some schoolboy playing spies but he will stand in the alcove for a moment.

That encounter went better than he had hoped. The tobacconist is a strong lead, and one corroborated separately by both Morte and the dustman.

So, calling up the mental image of Morte’s map: Flint Court is basically east and maybe a bit north of the mortuary, so… that should place it some miles north west of the Factry district, approximately. Morte said they were what, three or four miles from the tower, and he already walked about one mile.

To get to Flint Court he is going to go east… which is the direction going out the far end of the dustman’s square. He needs to go somewhere between zero and three miles further east, and If he meets the ditch he’ll know he’s about on the right longitude line. He doesn’t know how to recognize Sighs, but it sounds dismal.

When he sees the streets clean up a bit, or maybe if he starts to see houses of industry or foundry chimneys, then he’ll turn left, and then after fifteen minutes walking he should begin making inquiries for Flint Court. Once he’s there he’ll hang around stalls or public houses asking for tobacconists till he confirms he’s got the one with the big yard and the foul corpses stacked in it.

There's going to be a time limit, measured in hours at most, after which the dustmen as a whole will have a full description of his face, body, and tattoos. It would be surprising if the dustman in the pavilion were not troubled enough about their conversation to follow up, even if he is the sole member of his order manning that post. And it's likely the real abbot Traff's response to the breakout will involve messengers being sent to all dustmen in the Hive.

An old woman pushing a cart stacked high with filthy garments has approached and set up shop in front of him, blocking one of the two paths of egress from the alcove.  The other exit is around the opposite side of the tube.

Amusing.

First and foremost, this is a mission to find the journal. But if he fails in that while still finding the tobacconist, there may be other information he can glean.

He should take a moment and think about this logically. Given his five scenarios, what should he expect to see if each is true?

• Option a) He hears from the locals that a portal went wrong and suddenly opened upon an active theater of the Blood War. Powerful spell casters poured out. Mind flayers were seen. A gelatinous monstrosity sent by the outer gods of chaos struck a hundred Hivedwellers insane with its terrible musical piping
• Option b) Witnesses describe a singular explosion or flash neither preceded nor followed by sounds of any altercation. He discovers signs of booby traps and carefully laid fishing wire where his body was found. The remains of a complicated machine decorated in strange characters lies in a ruin within an alley
• Option c) Whatever he encounters will provide a surprisingly strong clue to do an exact thing, be at a precise place at a precise time, or to draw a very particular conclusion with high certainty (He'll have to check in on this one after the fact)
• Option d) - Mundane local street bloods empowered by some artifact or magical spell boast in a local bar of having killed a gray skinned wizard and made away with a hefty bounty. His journal is found in the keeping of the tobacconist, who found it by chance and plans to pawn it
• Option e) - He witnesses any event that is bizarre, intricate, and connected with his own person. Maybe the spot his body was found has an immaculately clean doll house stuffed with moldy cheese. An enchantment spell plays fiddle music and shouts 'swing your partner to the Styx' over and over again. A brigade of halfling sling archers salutes him as "The Gray Spectre"

He should also make an attempt at being less conspicuous. If he can secure a coat or shirt sleeves and some trousers and shoes, he can at least pass without comment as a merchant's guard.

He suddenly wonders about the degree to which ruffians are press ganged in the street into service or capture in the finer parts of Sigil. Harmonium officers, a favored faction employed by the Lady, he knows, are the general peacekeepers. But he hasn’t seen any yet.

Probing his memory of walking to this place from where he left Morte, what were the species, caste, and attire for the last ten passersby he can recall?

On his way to the dustmen’s pavilion he saw:

1. A pale skinned male humanoid youth with shoulder-length white hair and ears that extended upwards several inches.  The outer jacket was voluminous in its shoulder padding
2. A gnoll with a broad brimmed hat and muscular arms, a crossbow strapped to his back, sitting high in the driver’s seat of a coach pulled by two tapirs
3. A round-bodied human woman dressed in some sort of black clerical vestments, holding the hand of a small boy and walking in front of him, pulling him along unwillingly
4. A human woman of a caste similar to The Nameless One, but with a chocolate-colored complexion, with hair in many braided strands and wearing a traveling cloak
5. A creature the size of a dwarf but lighter in build, with a broad blue mustache and wearing a red tapered cap and a smart velvet suit
6. A fat, peach-skinned man in a tricorn hat and white shirtsleeves
7. A githzerai male scantily attired in open tunic and skin-tight pants, probably a streetwalker, and one of the only humanoids walking barefoot through these streets
8. A female giant, eight or nine feet tall, with half her scalp shaved, an unpleasant face, an irritated purple scar passing through the brow of one eye, dressed in some kind of military uniform with brass buttons and carrying a great halberd with a shaft too thick to be comfortably wielded by a smaller creature
9. A light-skinned human female street urchin in dirty, baggy clothes, too young and too grimy to be of use to anyone
10. A skinny human male of middle age, dressed in well-worn clark’s clothes, keeping his gaze downcast and walking swiftly

He isn’t confident whether that’s a representative picture of this part of The Hive or just what caught his eye in passing.

Judging by the milieu of this part of the city, what’s most likely to stand out in the memories of others will be his unclothed torso, the tattoos, and the muscular body. His first priority once he has the means should be to buy long sleeves and trousers.

He declines to interact with the old woman. He moves the other way around the iron tube and sticks his head out into the street, looking both ways for the telltale brown of the Dustman’s robe.

He finds that as he rounds the alcove the woman has somehow flipped the position of her cart, and now quickly pushes it in front of him on this side, blocking him once again.

Right.  

Okay. Sigil is being weird, and he's being made a fool by someone. 

“Grandam,” he says, and nods.

The crone glances at him bemusedly and then goes back to what she was doing, rummaging about.  She stands on the far side of her cart, forming a barrier between them.

He notices a washboard tied to one corner leg of the cart, with a basin and some hot coals in a fold-away compartment.  She appears to be preparing to wash some of her pile of filthy garments.

Okay. He can problem-solve this.

He backs up slowly, all the way to the alcove wall behind the tube, such that he can see both the woman and the cart on one side, and the clear unobstructed gap of several feet on the other side.

He makes as if to go to the open side, takes a step, pauses. How does she react?

She does not react.  She's largely obscured by the iron tube now, working on the other side of her cart.  She’s humming quietly to herself now.

He walks out through the gap into the street.

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.”

“Nah?  That’s a shame.  Even a gutter rat’s got a name.  

"Well, Mister No Name. Where is it that you want to go today?”

The smaller man shakes his head in annoyance.

“See, here’s the thing.  We could kill you.  We do kill.  With some degree of frequency.”

He shoots a glance at his compatriot.

“But we don’t want to.  It’s not our most favorite way for this to go.  See, our most favorite way is that you leave here happy.  You leave here happy and we leave here richer.  And next time you come through, we make it even quicker.  Once we come to terms, it’ll be a breeze.  A regular thing.  Like dropping a few coins on the bar top for a cup of daffy in the morning,”

“This body has no coins. They do not serve.”

His face darkens.  He draws a long dagger.  “That won’t do at all, see.  You’re going to have do a lot-”

A feminine voice rings out, much louder than they have been speaking and accented with some kind of foreign patois.  “Would you look at the size of that prick?” she says, and then whistles.

A tiefling woman in bright red leathers steps into view from the courtyard, brushes past the smaller man and steps directly up to The Nameless One.

Her movements are easy and sauntering.  A tail a yard in length and resembling that of a giant rodent twists and curls behind her.  She has visible tattoos on the neck and forearms, and her outfit has clearly been chosen to accentuate a good figure.

Evidently the leader of this trio.

And there may be more of the gang on the perimeter to catch him if he slips round the larger man.

He prepares himself. Her forearms look small enough that he could probably snap one quickly. The sequence should be woman, then small man, then large man.

She paces back and forth in front of The Nameless One, scrutinizing him.  

“Bet he’s got a strong back.”

Then she smiles, and standing up on tip toes beside him, speaks into his ear.  “Here’s how it is, love. When we’re born, we’re very small and stupid.”

Reading some pre-movement intent in The Nameless One she quickly steps back, perfectly calculating the edge of his reach, and staying just beyond the boundary. She holds her arms akimbo at their sides.

“Then, we grow up.  Most of us get bigger.

“Some of us - also get smarter.“ 

Midway through the last sentence her hand makes an almost imperceptible movement and launches a small spike or dart, resembling a pen knife, into the Nameless One’s abdomen. 

It pierces the skin and remains embedded, quivering.

“And some of us don’t.  So I’ll explain it to you.  You walk out of here without paying, it isn’t about you.  In your eyes, me making an exception for you makes it easier.  But it costs me.  There aren't any exceptions. Someone sees you walk out of here unharmed and without paying… That’s a huge problem. That costs me dearly, as sure as you took from my own pocket.  It costs me in any number of bloods I have to paste into the paving stones just to maintain the reputation of a respectable lady of business in these parts.”

She sighs.

“Now you’ve got about five minutes before the little nip I gave you knocks you flat on your ass for a good long while.  So we'll get paid one way or another. You’d best have squared with me and gotten yourself to safe kip by then, or else there’s really no telling what manner of indignities might be visited upon your person.”

She smiles cheerfully at him.

His face has remained relaxed and vacant throughout this entire encounter, not reacting even to the dart. The “errant outsider” persona was a total miss as far as avoiding the fight, but it still might make them more cautious about rushing him.  

He slowly shifts the scalpel into his off hand, and then pulls the spike out from where it protrudes from his abdomen with his right.  He cocks his head to the side like a bird, making as if to examine it. Then, without looking up, he launches the dart with a flick of his wrist at the small man.

He reaches out and seizes the woman by the wrist.  

“No.” he says.  

She leaps backwards, avoiding the grab, and lands in a crouch, already beginning to draw a weapon from a sheath in the thigh of her leathers.

The large man takes one step forward and swings the spike end of his axe in a great horizontal arc, aiming somewhere between the Nameless One’s throat and sternum.

He ducks under the incoming blow and allows it to strike the alley wall behind him. He rises and drives his palm upwards, striking the large man hard at the elbow with a blow driven by the full strength in his legs. It makes a satisfying crunch.  

He makes a backhanded sweep of his scalpel, drawing it up and across the large man’s throat with his left hand. The short blade might not be deep enough to sever the major bloodway, but it will at least buy him time.  

Then he turns to face Anna and the smaller man. They’re both at the edge of the courtyard and the narrow passage. They won’t be able to easily flank him within the limited space.

If they rush together, a quick jump backwards on his part might cause them to become entangled with one another.

What actions do they take in the next half second?

Anna is sizing up an opportunity to strike with a nasty looking curved blade.

The orange-haired man has apparently parried the thrown dart with his forearm.  He's now making a fencer’s balestra lunge towards The Nameless One.

STUN NOW

His interior mental voice shouts into his consciousness.

On instinct, The Nameless One raises his right hand and makes a precise counterclockwise gesture with his thumb and two fingers. 

Whatever the effect was supposed to be, it didn’t work. The Nameless One now has a thin blade running through his palm and sticking out the other side.

That was his dominant hand.

Question: How tightly is the orange haired man gripping his knife?

Quite firmly.  He wasn't lying about having killed with some frequency.

He lets forth a bellow of pain and draws his hand back, pulling the man in towards him. 

With his left hand he drops the scalpel and immediately uses it to seize the man’s dagger arm. He pulls him close, taking a half step with his back foot to position the man’s body between his own and Anna, and then headbutts him hard. He aims his own forehead at the bridge of his adversary’s nose.

It's a forceful enough blow that the man drops to the ground.

Seeing that the blade still protrudes from his right hand, he grits his teeth and wrenches it free. 

His eyes cloud with starbursts for a moment as he clasps the blade and faces Anna. 

She did not see an opportunity to strike.  She is shifting her feet continuously, in a slightly crouched position, eyeing him up.

She apparently respects his capacity for harm considerably more than she did a few seconds ago, and she now looks indecisive.

She turns her head and glances at the active Sigil portal in the crate behind her in the courtyard, then conspicuously shoots a look down at the orange-haired man.

Without breaking his focus on the position of Annah’s hands and feet, The Nameless One raises his right heel and brings it down with as much force as he can on the orange-haired man’s face.

Annah winces.

She opens her mouth as if to speak, then closes it.

She turns and sprints away, ignoring the portal and instead heading back through the courtyard.

Okay. How long has it been since the wound from the tiefling's dart? Thirty seconds? A minute?

He’ll quickly wring the necks of each man. He’s going to strip both corpses naked to see what valuables they may be carrying.  

What was the large man wearing? Will any of it fit The Nameless One?

The trousers are too large in the waist for him.  The boots look like they’d fit reasonably well.  The cotton vest has quite a bit of fresh blood.  

He’s definitely starting to feel a little bit off.  Vaguely intoxicated - vision leaving a bit of an after image when he turns his head.

He bites both sides of his tongue hard enough to cause lasting pain. What's a little poison to an immortal?

He discards the orange-haired man’s blade. Then he quickly wipes first his bleeding hand and then the vest on the trousers to clear some of the blood. He has to fight an instinctual urge to stop and bandage his wounded hand. He’ll grit his teeth against the pain of continuing to use it and don both vest and boots. The scalpel can go back in the belt of his loincloth. What valuables does he find?

The large man has a small coin purse with drawstrings.  Inside are two copper coins and a squished marzipan ball.  The smaller man wears a gold ring, and has a pocket full of copper coins.  He also appears to have some large silver coins stitched into his coat.

Swift scalpel strokes to liberate the coins, without regard for damaging the garment. All coins and the ring go in the coin purse, minus the marzipan. Coin purse strings are looped over a notch in his loin cloth and carried on the inside, resting against his thigh where the pockets in a pair of trousers would be.

With that he’ll drag both corpses to the Sigil portal in the courtyard, push them through, then pick up the battle axe, and walk briskly through the alley, heading towards Flint Court.

The passageway runs straight back with occasional entranceways and alcoves. 

He can see the end about a hundred yards away.  But he makes it less than half way.  He barely has enough presence of mind to drop the axe and try to raise his hands to deflect the pavement as it rushes upwards towards him.

He hits the ground and lies prone.

He dreams briefly.  

In the dream, there is a creature before him like a gargoyle. It has green skin. It smiles a toothy grin and laughs at him.

It points to a stack of papers and begins peeling them off, one by one, letting them drift to the ground in what is evidently very turbulent air.  

He maintains eye contact with The Nameless One, beginning to speed up his rate of peeling. 

His hands begin to move faster than any mortal man’s. He cackles with a delight that gleams manic in his eyes.

After a few minutes of stillness, a figure approaches the prone body lying in the alley.  She has her knife drawn.

She walks to the man's head and gives the side of his skull a tap with her toe. 

Then she squats beside him.  She slides one hand under his shoulder and attempts to flip his body face up.

Finding him too heavy for her to raise more than a few inches off the ground one-handed, she lets the shoulder return down with a soft thud.

She steps back and now approaches from the body's feet, straddling one of his legs.  She peels the edge of The Nameless One’s newly acquired vest away from his lower back and slips her fingers between the belt and the flesh beneath. She pulls backwards to create a gap between skin and garment and quickly slides her hand back and forth, feeling for anything lumpy or metallic.

Feeling nothing, she swaps the knife to her left hand, then uses her right to trace around The Nameless One’s belt, moving from the buttocks around the exterior of the right leg toward the front.  She discovers the scalpel and tosses it to the side.  Returning her hand, she feels the edge of what must be her dead gang member’s coin purse with her pinky just at the limit of the movement, where the man's thigh rests on the pavement. The Nameless One is apparently lying on the purse, resting his full weight upon it.

Annah makes an audible susurrus of frustration. She withdraws her hand and repositions herself on her knees.  She reaches up the loin cloth between The Nameless One’s legs to approach the purse from the other side.

The garment is apparently like a woman’s skirt: a single loop of cotton cloth without any fabric between the legs.

She leans further over The Nameless One, bringing her face directly above his mid-back to get her arm far enough forward.  Her left palm presses the hilt of her dagger flat against the paving stones off to the man’s side, supporting her weight.

The Nameless One comes to, face down with the feeling of a hand softly brushing his genitals from below as it searches for something along the front of his thigh.

All memories since awaking in the mortuary are intact.

His first thought is: They've trapped themselves. This won’t even test my reflexes.

He plants his left hand on the ground and then swings his right arm behind his back and roughly seizes the adversary’s hair.  He raises and twists his upper body rightward. Driving Annah’s head by a fistful of her hair, he forces it downwards and away from him, pinning and immobilizing her knife hand under her body.

“Yield.” he says.

“Shit,” she says involuntarily as The Nameless One suddenly moves.

Her right arm is twisted awkwardly at an angle between The Nameless One's legs, but she still has her fingernails to work with.  She digs her pinky and ring fingernails - all she can maneuver - into the base of the man's cock.

He's balanced on his left elbow, back and shoulders straining to push outwards. He's facing away from her and can't directly read her movements.  

He feels the fingernails and promptly clamps his legs together to put pressure on her wrist. It won't spare him much of the pain but it will limit the degree of force that she can apply.

He breathes heavily for a few seconds, thinking.

He can hold this position for a time, facing away from Annah and pinning her by her head with his right arm, but he cannot do so indefinitely. It's an angle that requires the use of small accessory muscles far beyond their usual writ.  

He twists his head leftward to the limits of its range of motion. He spies the blade of Annah's knife, pushed flat against the stone underneath her pinned left hand.

She is twisting her hips and flailing her legs but not able to get enough purchase to move her head or free either of her arms.

While the two of them remain in a grappling and not a striking engagement, he has no fear that she can defeat or incapacitate him again.

He needs to rotate his body in order to disarm or kill her. If he rotates left, he'll have to give up pressure on her head, freeing her to roll out of danger. If he rotates right, he'll be coming at her from the opposite side as the one holding her knife, giving her a chance to deliver a blow.

He chooses left.

He waits till her legs have left the ground in one of her periodic flailing kicks, and then he releases pressure on her head in order to swiftly rotate to the left.

The combination of releasing downward pressure and twisting his body with her right hand still squeezed tightly between his legs brings her head and shoulders up and forward, slamming the side of her face against his left flank, her chin colliding with the bony protuberance of his hip. Her arm now fully encircles and hugs his left leg.

He catches his weight with his right hand palm down, and reaches for her knife hand with his left.  He is fast enough to catch her left wrist as it slips out from under her shoulder, and he applies as much downward pressure as he can to reform the pin.

Their bodies are tangled up now. Her legs are more free but her knife hand is now held directly.  Her right forearm is still squeezed between his thighs, now positioned lower down and just out of reach of his genitals.

“Enough.” he says.

The force of being crushed against her knife hand for several seconds considerably slows her reflexes, and so she isn't able to get the knife free before being gripped by the man again.  She continues to put as much energy into moving her wrists as she can for a few seconds.

Then, finding it futile she suddenly stills her upper body.

She is facing orthogonal to him now, with her forehead against his breast.

She bends her knees and brings the soles of both feet flat against the ground in preparation to attempt a lunge.

“Peace, cutter?” she says meekly.

“I am disarming you. Release the knife.” 

He squeezes her hand just below the base of the thumb and begins twisting with increasing pressure. He will begin to break her outer carpals if she does not release the grip on her knife within the next three seconds.

She releases the knife.

Maintaining a level of pressure that is painful but not bone-breaking, he wields their two hands together as a clumsy appendage to swat at the blade, sending it skittering four or five feet hence to the alley wall.

“You can no longer win. You will now untangle yourself from my body.”

Relying on the force of his legs clamped about her right arm to keep her immobilized, he briefly releases and then reforms his left hand grip into what is more of a compliance hold, with the thumb and two fingers in a C grip just below the bone of her wrist. She is slender enough that his thumb reaches his first knuckles and forms a seal beyond her ability to break.

“Remove your arm from between my legs and place it palm upwards, away from your body.”

He releases the pressure of his squeezing legs and raises his hips, placing a portion of his weight on his left knee to allow her to withdraw.

The arm has lost circulation.  She moves it clumsily.  Eventually it flops to her side.

The movement opens her posture towards him, but she keeps her chin tucked and eyes tracking his flank at breast level.  She doesn't want him to read her expression.

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.”

“My mistake.”

After a pause to see if more mollification is needed, “I am unfamiliar with this quarter. Will you take coin for good information?”

"I'll take coin."

“I share freely with my friends.

I need to find a tobacco shop. There is a human man of middle age who owns one in this quarter. The shop has a large yard. Do you know it?”

“Any leaf worth the light comes from Pauvine.  She got a cart near the sign of the fool’s cap.  Wouldn't take none from t'other.”

He retrieves his coin purse and begins counting out coppers. He nods gravely at the creature.

“That may well be. I cannot attest to the quality of his product.”

He slowly stacks coins one at a time on the rim of the water trough. He pauses at five. 

“Nevertheless I have business with the tobacconist with the shop by the yard. Where is it?”

The tramp’s eyes stare unwinkingly at the coin stack.  When The Nameless One withdraws his hand, he wrinkles his nose.

"Here.  In the Court."

He shakes out a dozen or so more coins into his hand. There look to be about a hundred total in his possession. 

The silvers are a little too large to be one-ounce coins if they’re the pure metal… so he has what, 6oz silver and a hundred commons? Certainly enough to lodge somewhere in The Hive for a few days, but his wallet may need to withstand several more such exchanges.

Enunciating his words slowly and precisely he says, “A tobacconist. Has a shop. With a yard. He is a human male.”

His eyes quickly scan the coins in his hand.

“There are fifteen commons here. I vow that if you can lead me to a place in Flint Court that fully passes that description, I will give you these coins in addition to that pile. Do you accept my terms?”

The tramp shakes his head violently from side to side, spraying water on The Nameless One.

“Aye,”  he says.

“Kiss your pecker for another twenty?”

Whether because of the words or because of some disturbance in the air caused by the shaking of the creature's long hair, The Nameless One just then catches a whiff of his own bodily scent, and the odor triggers an involuntary upward curl of his lip in displeasure.

He reaches behind his head to pluck at the  seams of his vest where they itch the skin. He feels the dampness of sweat there.

“Not today,” he says.

He closes his palm around the handful of coins and gestures for the creature to take the stack of five.

“The rest when we arrive. Show me the way.”

This part of The Hive seems to have been built all in one go, perhaps on the whim of a planner who very much fancied red bricks and right angles.  The streets are narrow, and they’re bordered on either side by an uninterrupted line of two-story square structures.  There are sewer grates every hundred feet or so, and the streets seem to alternate from pure unsigned residential to 80% mercantile with colorful, if weathered, signboards.  The Nameless One glimpses one that says “Moonmaiden Shoe Repair” above a poorly drawn caricature of a female face with brown complexion and long white hair.

They cross a plaza with a row of pop-up merchant stalls and a stationary caravan full of wagons packed with something loose and bulky held under cloth.

On the other side the tramp leads them behind a line of townhomes with narrow individuated courtyards.  The shared outer wall of the yards is of wooden pickets and stands maybe six feet tall, with periodic masonry fence posts to demarcate the homes.