One more recon

You've scouted this particular target so many times that it could easily become routine, but you've learnt never to let any of your jobs become routine. The Orestes mansion was at one time an isolated tower standing fifty feet above the street below. Sometime in the past one hundred years the gardens between the tower and the street were converted into rooms for the inhabitants of the estate. You decide to circle the estate again checking for any changes since your last visit.

The view from where you currently are standing shows the front of the house. 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 you don't see the regular movement of armed men around the tower top - 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.