…Go to the manor, and end this for good.

The logical detective wins. You let go of your leg and sit-up, silently apologising to the victims below, before sliding down to the roofs edge and climbing down. You give another look at the big building in the distance, its shape more concealed now that you’re lower, before looking for a way to get there.

A dark alley runs behind the tavern, but there’s no easy way down, save for the familiar broken building in the distance. You start to pick your way back across the rooftops, chased by a laughter that seems somehow inhuman, freezing as a fresh scream cuts the air and slices you to the bone. Apologising again, you resume your quiet journey back to the broken house that brought you here, carefully climbing down to the street below.

You see some men staggering down the road in the distance and decide to leave the village and slip into the woods that surround it. You walk with quick steps but a subdued mood, ashamed that you just walked away, ashamed at your powerlessness. It was the right choice, you remind yourself; by letting one family suffer, you increase the odds that hundreds of others will not. All that matters now is finding ‘The Great Captain Wendigo’ and seeing her dead.

You’re swallowed by the darkness of the woods as you leave ‘civilisation’ behind, its lights and sounds smothered as you walk through the islands undergrowth. You take a wide arc, aiming for where the mansion should be, trying to clear you mind of what you have just seen and focus on the task ahead. Before you’re done, you’re there.

Your judge of distance was only slightly off, as you find yourself at the far edge of the mansions grounds, moving up the line of trees and bushes before a wide lawn, careful to stay low as you do so. It looks like this side of the grounds has a large overgrown garden, its dirt beds overflowing with flowering bushes and the stone paths winding through it swallowed by encroaching growth. No sentries patrol the abundance of life, just as none patrolled the forest or walk across the open uncut grasses that you can see.

You linger at the edge, where once cultivated garden turns to woodland, taking **** lungful’s of the many heavy scents, the thick night air mixing with well bloomed summer flowers.

The mansion itself is a good size. Not as big as some of the others you’ve seen on the Coronac mainland and certainly not as big as those back in the Principalities, but it has a decaying grandeur to it. It’s a place used by the wealthy to retreat to, not to work; working would be what the village was for. It must have taken a fortune to build, its smaller size more than outweighed by its remoteness as much of the material would have been shipped in from the mainland, though the forest behind you could have supplied much of the lumber you suppose. It has windows on both its lower and upper floor and only a handful of them glow with light. That there are no panes broken or missing tell you it is good glass and well-sealed, though you dismiss breaking in that way for the noise if nothing else. As you look up, for the briefest second you see movement on the roof: the back of a man as he walks slowly away. There’s no way that he saw you, hidden behind the wide leaves of what smells like a Simony bush, but you’ll definitely have to keep an eye on him.

The whole building looks like a stately show of power, and a guarded fortress to boot; if Captain Washkin is anywhere on the island then it will be here at least. You’d know, even if you found this place by accident.

You look towards the difficult task of ingress. Breaking and entering is not something that those in the law profession tend to do very often and rarely by stealth, so you think back to the time you helped catch a sneak thief: a tiny little man, shorter even than you, called Job. He told you, as part of his confession and subsequent betrayal of fences and brokers, that to attack a building is to attack a man: you capture the high ground. He insisted that ivy or a drainpipe would lead up to an unlocked door more often than a locked one, and so you look over the building. It does indeed have a drainpipe, albeit one that leads up to a guarded roof. You also admit that he was caught in the end. You slowly make your way from the garden, following the treeline as you probe for other options.

Far around to the left is the building’s front face, and sunken into its middle is the main entrance. It’s guarded by the distant silhouette of what you take at first to be two men leaning against the wall, but then realise, with surprise and a little trepidation, they are in fact just one very well built man when he shifts his position. Even if you had an army, you’d hesitate to take on that brute. Silently commending the captain’s choice, you work your way back, not willing to cross the open path and into his sight.

Far around to the right, you view the bulging back end of the building. While the front face was a long be-windowed wall, save for the sunken front entrance, the back is the opposite, coming out step by step, each extension a boxy push outward reaching furthest in the middle and the building far side. The windows are also different, some very large and some impractically small, matching the haphazard look of the rear. It seems that, like most nobility, the person who built this only cared about their front facing appearance. There’s another door in the middle, on the other side of the first bulge, and another guard to go along with it, both of which are skinnier than their counterparts at the front. As before, you don’t go further, lest you’re seen.

With the front and back entrances watched, you can see three options between them from your current side, all best accessed through the garden and the much shorter dash across the lawn that would follow. As you consider them, you duck under a bush and begin to walk crouched down one of its paths.

The nearest way would be the drain pipe leading up to the roof. It looks sturdy despite its age and the more you watch the manor the more you’re sure only one guard patrols the large roof. It would be possible to climb up after he passes and have time to figure out what to do long before his circuit brings him back around again.

Another way would be through a window, the most covert of which is one set flat against the ground, long and thin and likely leading into a cellar. It’s positioned under some strange looking balcony jutting out from the upper floor far above and has some boards pinned to it, nailed into the wooden frame. To a casual observer, it would look sealed, but to you they look old and rotten and it shouldn’t take much effort to pull them off.

The final way… looks less likely the more you think about it. There is a narrow bit of roof as part of the mess at the back, where the lower floor juts out further than the upper one. Some dead looking ivy grows from a large plant pot near the cellar window itself, climbing up an old trellis to the narrow sub roof, which in turn progresses along to a half open window on the second floor, one that seems bright with the light of occupation, but open and inviting. The problem with such a way is that it would mean rustling the dry ivy and creaking wooden crosshatch as you climb, then walking along the loud looking pot roof tiles while silhouetting yourself through several shut and moon-bathed windows along the way, and finally entering into a room that’s clearly occupied. Maybe you should leave that as a last resort. You can always come back to it.

You’re reduced to crawling when the plants thin, stopping when they abruptly end to give way to a wide open lawn. It may be uncut, but it’s not nearly long enough for a person to crawl through. You’ll have to run to one of the entrances, to minimise the chance of being seen from one of the unlit windows.

You take a breath. The roof or the cellar. Up or down. No one is watching and one is as good as the other.