The skies spat rain, reeking defecation leaking from the darkness above—rather than cleaning the streets, the running putridity congealed, bunching muck in gutters and potholes. The streets all but barren, the few that remain without shelter beggars from the downpour scramble in screaming rushes from alleys, escaping gruesome suffocation in the liquidized mess of their own offal. Their skinny bodies, caked in thick filth, flop about in the newly formed rivers of overspilling sewer grates, waked from soggy sleep.
You have been tracking the man for hours now, following along as a hounds does, all your sense invested in each minute detail imbedded in the cobblestones. A spattering of dried blood, a clump of hair (a patch of skin still clinging on), the still leaking painted finger of whore whose death-throes you managed to hear, but where at that too far back to save. You found the rest of the body, but the killer had long since left the scene. Disappointment, and wretched tiredness frays your nerves to the breaking point. And yet, you can feel a rushing in the air—tonight all this will change. Never before have you been this close to the man, such a short lead does he still have.
Two weeks ago the man opened the throats of orphans siblings huddled on the doorstep of a local church. Three day before that he left the mangled body of a chimney sweep, and the youth's cat too. A green grocer was mangled in the doorway of his own shop, opening for an early morning on market day. Again and again he has ended lives, without ever investigation, without justice. He has been ignored, with such clear determination, that you can still feel the pit in your stomach. The hard knot of truth, that the Watch simply doesn't care. You have refused to fail again.
A block ahead you hear the whispers of the demon's laugh, a throaty rasp more than a chuckle, caught in the storm and carried upon bitter winds to your ears. The laugh had ever sense of fateful purpose: it could be only a sign. An acknowledgement of the end; of approaching inevitability. Tonight would be the finale, the laugh promised. You have answered the challenge with stalwart resolve.
Footsteps sunken in mud, the rubble of broken bricks—by now this trail has become deliberate—leading you to this point. Turning a final corner, now deep into the twisting debris of Lowtown, you see ahead the gutted remains of a disheveled warehouse, empty of squatters, flooded with ruin. Through the beating rain, you can just make out a gangly shape disappearing through a shattered window, followed swiftly by that same damnably chocked laugh.
The street are clear, save for the stuffed remains of drowned rats in the side alley to your left. An open courtyard perhaps thirty feet wide precedes the warehouse, which might be at most four stories high, ancient and imposing under the misshapen shadows of crooked gargoyles. The stone is moss-covered, the wood rotten. To the left and the right the tenements collide against one another, building aerial passageways linked by broken walls, or unused chimneys. The few who live among the silent block do not make their presence known, preferring to crouch back away from the glooms of oil lamps, of which only a few ever remain lit. Even without the spiteful intercession of the heavens, the lack of illumination would be practically tangible all the same.
In the sudden pause of the quiet space, the initiative is yours…
Spoiler: Additional Info
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The street is thirty feet wide, and after forty feet directly forward the warehouse ruins begins. The building itself is a large corporate building sixty feet wide with a forty foot face, and four stories. You can see from the outside that the building is partially collapsed, and vandalized, throughout the interior. On the street itself there are street-lamps every ten feet, though the few that are actually lit are still dim, not offering much light.
You all are in various places about the area, though not together. Where, exactly, you have been following the murderer from is up to you: someone might have been following him on foot, while another is atop the adjacent buildings, and so on.
Pathfinder -- The Unraveling Group One
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