"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.”