[Envinyatar]

‘By the One, it’s dark down here! She could have at least given me a candle!’

Derufin muttered his way down the stairs, picking his was carefully step by step. Once his foot nearly slipped on a pile of old rags stored to the side of one of the rough wood steps and another time he stumbled over a stack of old ledgers left mouldering there once the pages had been filled. To his left on the open stairway was a small shaft of dim light where the last of the evening’s light crept in through a small dirty window near where the top of the cellar cleared the ground it was dug into.

Funny, he thought, that the small window should be open. ‘I should see to that,’ he said into the cool air that drifted in through it. ‘Too many edibles down here, don’t want some critter getting in to eat his fill and make a mess of everything.’

He paused at the foot of the stairs, getting his bearings. Beneath the staircase he knew was the pantry where cook kept the root vegetables and spices that needed cooler storage. To the right of the stairs, taking up the length and most of the width of the Inn building above it was where the casks of ale and mead and bottles of wine and flagons of other spirits were stored. Being on The Great East Road, the Inn often saw a heavy flow of traffic, and it prided itself on never having to turn away a customer’s request for a drink.

To the left of the stairs, as he remembered from the few times he’d been down here, were floor to ceiling shelves, packed with all those ‘necessary’ contraptions the Innkeepers through the years had thought they needed. The poor light from the dingy window gave him just enough light to pick out the ‘drink thing’ that Aman had so vaguely described.

And wouldn’t you just know it,’ he grumbled, reaching his arms above his head. ‘It was someone’s bright idea to store it up high.’

The ‘thing’, a large, awkward metal contraption had been the pride and joy of one of the Innkeepers before the War. Some passing tradesman had seen the beaming Innkeeper as a prize pullet and plucked him fully – selling a lemon-squeezing device he’d been unable to unload since he’d been conned into it Rohan. To his credit it did squeeze twenty lemons at a time, but the thing was so large and so cumbersome, it became an ordeal to get it out and then put it back when needed. The cook at that time had put her foot down about it taking up space in her kitchen. So the fabulous lemon juicer had been put away these past ten years, and now sported a heavy coating of dust and cobwebs.

He had just stepped back with one leg, and shifted his weight to it, in preparation for pulling the squeezer down and to the floor, when he heard a rustling noise behind him. ‘Who’s there?’ he called, his arm muscles already tensing for the pull. He looked over his right shoulder and saw something scurry deeper into the shadows.

‘Hey!’ he yelled loudly at whatever had moved.

His movements to see what was behind him threw the juicer off balance on the shelf, and before he could move out of the way it came crashing down on him, knocking him on his back - coming to rest on his left lower leg, pinning his ankle between its bulk and the unforgiving hardness of the packed earth floor.

Stars and indeed entire constellations exploded before his eyes, and curses poured from his mouth which would have made a corsair cower . . .