They spent another two days and nights at the cavern inn. Spending pretty much every hour of every day there gave Kre a lot of time to study the way that the building blended almost seamlessly into the caves cut into the cliffside. His only excursions away from the inn were to exercise the horses twice a day and, three times so far, to collect the odd package for Dain from various folks.
The Inn was the first building visible upon approaching Yahaestra, which made sense given the importance of such a business to a community made up almost entirely of travelers and wanderers. The look of it, however, was very different from the Mintas Lodge, which was the second-most impressive structure in his village, the first being of course the Hadam’s home atop the hill overlooking the village and all their financial investments.
The Inn, as it was simply called, appeared to be little more than a ramshackle mining warehouse abutting the base of the cliff. The building, however, served only as the stables and a narrow crack in the mountain led through the rock about thirty feet deep into a large chamber that served as the main common room. Beleg had quizzed him about why the stables had been placed where they were and Kre had no good answer to respond with.
The big man later gave up on his young protegee and explained that the stable location served two purposes, both defensive in nature. First, anyone approaching the Inn needed to sneak past a building full of potentially skittish horses, any of which could make a noise that any of the help would hear and raise concern about; and secondly, anyone fleeing the Inn could get right to their horse without being seen by anyone surveilling the Inn. That little bit of a head start could be crucial, Beleg explained, for the kinds of folks that frequented this odd place.
From the main common room, where Kre slept along with all of the other hired or otherwise indentured help, over half a dozen narrow tunnels led to other chambers like the kitchen and storage area and even down towards the private rooms where Dain and Beleg were housed. Kre estimated that there were at least ten of those private chambers as well as two large bathing rooms fed by an underground hot spring. All told, the Inn was an impressive use of subterranean space and if he hadn’t been told repeatedly that the tunnels and chambers had all been in place when the first Yahaestran’s made their way here, he wouldn’t have believed it.
Given the amount of time he spent at the Inn, he spent time studying the tunnel walls as a way to alleviate the monotony. He finally admitted to himself that, though he really had no idea what he was looking for, there was no indication that passages were chiseled or cut by hand. In fact, most of the passages were either utterly smooth and oval shaped, with a wooden plank serving as the flat surface to walk on, or the passages were clearly a natural break in the stone, complete with sharp edges that caught him more than once so far.