Book One – Chapter 20

That said, the escorting party had explained some things as well:

From the east, that is, from the Barnstreams, the Snowtrail narrowed and was eventually forced between two steep rock faces that rose like the walls of a giant’s tomb. More of the guild had been carved into these cliffs, left and right of the trail. The trail itself, along with these two sections, ran at a right angle to the western structure. The western section housed the Common Room and guest quarters, while the two eastern sections were more utilitarian. They offered layers of defence — whatever that meant in practice. Yu had not asked, and he had not yet explored these sections himself. Upon arrival, he had been led straight through to the Common Room, and since then, he had done little else than cleaning, serving dinner, and being scolded for both.

  Whatever.
 None of that mattered now.

This did: Simply put, the Albweiss Mountain Guild was not a single compact building, but three distinct sections. They were cut into the opposing rock faces of the Datan and bound together by an internal framework threaded through the mountain itself. It was a passageway through the stone.

There was no practical reason to bypass the guild. Yu guessed that in theory, you could try to climb the surrounding cliffs, but from what he had heard, they were all steep sawtooth-peaks with brittle faces; basically impossible to climb. The only alternative was to abandon the Snowtrail from the outset and attempt a wide detour through uncharted mountain terrain, regions that existed on maps only as blank space. That, too, bordered on suicide. The Snowtrail was deadly enough. Everything beyond was worse.

No one in their right mind attempted such a thing. No one had to. Without grave reason, no traveller was denied passage through the guild — except orcs and witches, obviously. That was the guild’s purpose, more than anything else. The Albweiss Mountain Guild was a sentinel between a mountain full of orcs and the passage to the western Snowtrail.