At least look.

If the guards are really gone, this might be the best opportunity you'll ever have to get even with the city patrician. Besides, you decide as you make your way from one roof top to the next towards your target, if you went home tonight you'd have to try to fall asleep with the image of the bloody barmaid waving Alrechi's severed cock in his face as she laughs like a harpie burnt into your eyes.

In less than five minutes you find yourself perched next to a chimney on the tiled roof of a tall apartment building that overlooks the square across from Orestes' tower estate. You sit for ten minutes confirming that the guards are indeed missing from the high lookout post; there are no lights on anywhere in either the two story townhouse or the tower that rises into the night sky, but this late at night that does not surprise you. Climbing down to the square you move around Orestes' city mansion.

There are no windows at all on the first floor, and the five windows on the second level about twelve feet from the street are protected by heavy iron bars. The roof over the rooms that were built in what was once the estate gardens is tiled with smooth fired red tiles that slope gently to the old tower. These tiles are incredibly slick when wet, but it hasn't rained for days and it is still a little early for the morning dew to form. You are pretty sure that you can move over the tile roof to the open veranda on the next level, but you have never actually tried to do this. Each time you scouted the estate before Orestes had two guards that looked out from the catwalk on the roof of the tower. Anyone looking down at the roof could not possibly miss a thief scrambling across these tiles. However tonight those men are missing - maybe your luck is finally changing. Squeezing down a narrow alley that separates Orestes house from its neighbor you reach the other side of the tower.

The tower's North face is flanked by a small stream that cuts along the base of the tower leaving a small triangular garden near the kitchen door. At other times the garden may have been a pretty place for the household to sit during the hot summer months. Perhaps children would play by the stream, but now it is used as a squalid pen for poultry, visited only by kitchen staff who dump the daily scraps into the muddy enclosure.

The wall to the kitchen garden was only 6 feet tall and easy enough to climb, but even in the early hours of the morning the geese in the pen would create a racket if they were disturbed. You have slipped by the geese on a particularly cold night last year, the kitchen door had been barred from inside, but the wall on the north side of the tower had significantly more wear than the rest of the tower. If you plan to climb the main tower directly to Orestes rooms, this is the place to do it.

Wading into the shallow stream bed you reach the last possible entrance into the mansion. A sewer flows from under the old tower and empties into the stream, the sewer is blocked by a heavy iron gate and a rusty lock that is opened only occasionally so some unlucky soul can crawl under the privies and scrape out the foul waste that accumulates with their use. The lock is still as fast as ever, and you wonder if your picks are thick and strong enough to open this heavy lock thick with corrosion.

It took several weeks of dressing in rags covered with filth but at last you were able to spend an evening drinking cheap beer and commiserating with this wretched soul about the poor treatment of the newest servant in a household. Despite the fact that the boy stank from repeated exposure to the goose pen and kitchen slop, getting him to talk wasn't as easy as you thought it would be. You slowly lost enough coin to the boy over the course of the night rolling dice that he was feeling like the luckiest soul in all of Athenapolis. As his winnings piled up he started buying beer and finally by the end of the night flush with drink and success he told you about two other gated passageways that lead from this sewer up into the tower.

Crawling around sewers was not your preferred approach to any job, but you have done it before. A person can learn a great deal about the operation of a household by examining the droppings and listening to what most considered to be their most private conversations.

Following the stream back to the square completes your circuit, now you have to decide what to do.