Chantry bastille

The Chantry bastille is the Borosevo Chantry's detention and inquisitorial facility, a surprisingly unassuming brutalist structure at the base of the ziggurat atop which Borosevo Castle perches — sitting beside the Chantry's copper dome and slim towers, a thousand feet below the castle garden terraces. Its interrogation chambers are built below and around sea level: stainless steel balloons inflated inside cubes, with walls, floor, and ceiling blurring into one another, no shadows, and cold glow panels fixed to the ceiling. The floor has a grate at the base of the prisoner's cross. The chambers are frost-cold.

The group cell where the ten Cielcin captives are held is a more spartan space: sectioned concrete walls, floor, and ceiling, pendant cable lighting with yellow bulbs dialed low, fronted with actual metal bars painted white — the paint chipped and flaking. A red painted line on the floor marks the minimum safe distance from the bars, calibrated for human arm length, which proves insufficient against the longer reach of Cielcin arms. The bastille shares the frequent brownout problems common to the rest of the castle's power systems, which Valka Onderra is able to exploit using her neural lace.