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.