Head Down

The stairs creaked beneath Aaralons foot as he descended.

As he moved out of the thin light of the hall the darkness seemed to open up to him. He could suddenly make out the outline of the landing at the bottom of the stairs, the bare soil seemed to have been hard-packed by long years of travel. The air was dry, the scent of soil, slowly mouldering food and age filled his nose but cutting across all of it was a scent he had come to know all too well.

The stink of sex.

He stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked around the dark space. A candle and matches sat on a small table by the stairs and Aaralon quickly scrabbled to light it.

The candle flickered to life and the room was suddenly cast into a shifting tableau of shadows that at first made it hard to make out the details of anything. Yet even in that confusing mess, Aaralon could see one thing.

It sat at the far end of the cellar on a slightly raised dais and stuck out from the rest of the room like a sore thumb. It wasn’t often that you found a set of stocks bolted to the floor in the cellar of a priest.

Aaralon moved closer to the stocks as his mind raced. Perhaps they had been left over from some previous tenant of the house? Maybe a relic of some now abandoned form of punishment? He had known of places where the stocks where still used on the drunks and vagabonds of the town. Maybe they had just done away with that old practice and the stocks had landed up here?

All of these possibilities vanished as Aaralon got close enough for the light of the candle to catch on the dried fluids on the stones the stocks stood upon. Aaralon leaned down and the stink of sex nearly overwhelmed him. He could almost see the acts that had been performed here.

His heart hammered in his chest as he realised that there was no way these things could have happened any more than a day or two ago. Acts that the priest either knew about or was partaking in.

He smiled then as a tiny part of the tension that seemed to have become his norm vanished. He had a way to get to the priest. The only question was how to use it. He would need to find out first just what went on here or what was going on here. He looked around at the piles of dusty furniture and mouldering sacks, there were plenty of places to hide here.

Yet such a risky course of action might not help him at all, after all, how could he know the next time the priest would bring someone down here? He could be stuck waiting for days! Surely it would make more sense to stake the place and the man out. Figure out the pattern and then sneak back down.

He still didn’t know exactly how he would be able to use this information against the priest but he knew it would make his task in this town much much easier.