Sky Cells=Terrible idea

[TerrorVoid]

Just thinking about it: You put in prison only those people who you want to see alive. If you want them dead, so why bother? 
But if you want someone alive, those cells, driving people to suicide are just awful. You can't keep hostages, you can't keep small criminals. You will execute big criminals anyway. If person's fate is not decided, you are just driving possibly innocent person to suicide.

 

What do you guys think? 

[Jaime4Brienne]

I thought the sky cells were a great idea. Just  knowing you might be put in a place like that would surely deter crime. I think they put people in there that they don't care live or die. If they roll off the edge while sleeping and fall then that is the gods will. 

[StarkofWinterfell]

Have you ever skydived? It's one of the greatest feelings possible. 

A gift it is, to be put in the sky cells.

[Equilibrium]

It is great actually.

As Arryns would say "Oh, you claim you are innocent and have proofs, great, as I am honorable and high as fuck I will not just execute innocent man, you will have just trial, I have a place for you to wait for the said trial. Just one thing suicide will be taken as admission of guilt and accidental fall will be taken as suicide"

 

[SeanF]

The cells are a subtle form of psychological torture.

[HexMachina]

7 minutes ago, SeanF said:

The cells are a subtle form of psychological torture.

Yep. I suppose it's about balance - if you want info from someone, a couple of days in the sky cells (enough to break them but not drive them to suicide) is going to leave them a quivering wreck practically begging to spill what they know.

Of course, there is always a danger of pushing too far and the prisoner dying, but that is true of any torture.

[Walda]

56 minutes ago, StarkofWinterfell said:

Have you ever skydived? It's one of the greatest feelings possible. 

A gift it is, to be put in the sky cells.

If there were BASE jumpers in Westeros, the Vale of Arryn would be inundated with them, and the Eyrie crime rate would Skyrocket go off the wall go through the roof climb  err, increase

.ETA Presumably, if the Lord of the Eyrie intended the prisoner to live and could not let them escape (eg. Hostages of war or troublesome Lords Declarant), he would have  a guarded room for them in one of the towers, rather than lock them in a sky cell.

[Free Northman Reborn]

Would be kind of cool if they imprison someone like Jarl the Climber in one, and he proceeds to climb his way out of it.

[Blade of Sunlight]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

The cells are a subtle form of psychological torture.

Precisely, like the black cells turned to 300, it would make people confess or give you the information you want. You could also slowly drive them to suicide and so kill them without having to sentence them to death, and ultimately there are likely some other cells/locked rooms available if you want to be sure your prisoner won't die.

 

[mediterraneo]

Well, I understand these are a fantasy thing but...

Let's say you caught a noble prisoner you cannot really kill.
Let's say the Queen's brother, let's say the son of some terrifying, powerful man.
Let's say you'd like to see hime die, but that you cannot kill him.
If everybody knows that people do suicide themselves in those prisons, you'll have a good lever to negotiate, or a way to pretend not to have killed anyone, depending on how things play out.
And about small criminals: how many small criminals will be taken to she sky cells? Small criminals will be judged where they live, and almost nobody lives in the upper part of the Eyrie.
It would be stupid to bring them up through all that road, and then having to bring up food for them too. If someone robs a chicken in the valley, let them cut his hand in the valley, and be happy with that. Or send him to the Wall, or wherever. Why bring him up to the Sky Cells?
Only valuable prisoners will be kept there.

[Hangover of the Morning]

25 minutes ago, mediterraneo said:

Well, I understand these are a fantasy thing but...

Let's say you caught a noble prisoner you cannot really kill.
Let's say the Queen's brother, let's say the son of some terrifying, powerful man.
Let's say you'd like to see hime die, but that you cannot kill him.
If everybody knows that people do suicide themselves in those prisons, you'll have a good lever to negotiate, or a way to pretend not to have killed anyone, depending on how things play out.
And about small criminals: how many small criminals will be taken to she sky cells? Small criminals will be judged where they live, and almost nobody lives in the upper part of the Eyrie.
It would be stupid to bring them up through all that road, and then having to bring up food for them too. If someone robs a chicken in the valley, let them cut his hand in the valley, and be happy with that. Or send him to the Wall, or wherever. Why bring him up to the Sky Cells?
Only valuable prisoners will be kept there.

I agree. You'd obviously put only special type of prisoner to the Sky Cells, i.e. the once you need to confess or divulge some important information. If Lysa wasn't bonkers, Tyrion would have been kept in a locked room in one of the towers.

Petty criminals would be given an immediate sentence: hand/head/Wall/moon door ... and would likely not be dragged up to the Eyrie.

A Skye Cell is really an elegant torture chamber rather than a place to keep prisoners for a prolonged period of time. 

I wonder if they ever put more than one person into the chamber?

[mediterraneo]

1 hour ago, Hangover of the Morning said:

I agree. You'd obviously put only special type of prisoner to the Sky Cells, i.e. the once you need to confess or divulge some important information. If Lysa wasn't bonkers, Tyrion would have been kept in a locked room in one of the towers.

Petty criminals would be given an immediate sentence: hand/head/Wall/moon door ... and would likely not be dragged up to the Eyrie.

A Skye Cell is really an elegant torture chamber rather than a place to keep prisoners for a prolonged period of time. 

I wonder if they ever put more than one person into the chamber?

On your question: it seems likely, as they have a person whose only job is to take care of the prisoners, Mord.
It is not very bright though, maybe he is the bastard son of the castellan and they don't want to send him away, and they left him with some rarely important task or something.

[Walda]

Yeah, Mord.

Halfwitted, illiterate, thieving, sadistic, and corruptible.

Never mind that the very concept of the sky cells - with the prisoner ostensibly chosing the time and door he exits from, are in keeping with the Arryn Words - "As High as Honor".

Never mind that the Vale has a surfeit of true knights that loved Jon Arryn well, and more younger sons than they know what to do with, and yet Jon Arryn chose Mord as the gaoler of his seat.

Or maybe it was Ser Vardis who looked into those small shifty brown eyes, and saw "the look of a man who had often been tricked"(AGoT,Ch.38 Tyrion V) and thought that was just what the Eyrie needed in a turnkey - someone who won't realise that the pay is crap, that he won't even get to bathe as often as his prisoners, someone who would spend all his uniform allowance on the only pair of steelcaps in Westeros, and spend the rest of his days shivering in the sky cells, in his ill-fitting unlaundered uniform that gapes to display his pallid flesh.

I've so many questions about Mord. In which battle did he lose his ear? Why are his teeth rotten (nobody else in the Eyrie seems to be troubled with excessive dental decay) - is he taking some kind of medicinal cordial, does he have an unusually sweet tooth? What is with the poor hygiene?

It isn't as if unswerving loyalty and incorruptible integrity are what Lord Arryn would be looking for in the man who has the power to free his most dangerous enemies and allow them to roam his castle at will, now, is it? It just seems, if you are going to stint on pay and proper clothes, the gaoler was not the best place to start those economies.

What does he do, on a daily basis? When there are prisoners he must manage the thin blankets, one per cell (although Sansa imagines Marillion curled up in a fur - if he was, Mord would manage the fur as well, probably for a price). Muck out old straw and replaces with clean on a reasonably regular basis, empty the chamberpot, and fill the water pitcher. Keep the sky cell cloakroom and bathhouse in order, brings food at least once and probably twice a day, supervise torture, attend them when they make too much noise (unless its music - apparently he doesn't mind music, like Cerberus).

We know there were at least four sky cells over two storeys (one each side and one above the one Tyrion inhabited), and very probably many more. However, it seems most of them are empty, and it might even be that Tyrion and Marillion were his only prisoners, and they were not in the sky cells concurrently.

Tyrion bribed his way out of the cell by giving Mord the gold in his purse. Marillion, well who knows what happened with Marillion? Mord is not doing great, as far as security is concerned. He doesn't seem capable of providing his employer with timely reliable information on the presence or absence of prisoners under his care, either. Or maybe he does, but he only reports confidentially to Lady Lysa or Lord Petyr... and Maddy, who knows all about Marillion's newly removed fingers.

I find it hard to believe that in a community as small and unchanging as the Eyrie, it would be that hard to keep track of who was and wasn't in the not very sound-proof sky cells. Even if Mord was the soul of discretion, and the prisoners were not inclined to howling and singing, someone would have to have noticed that they haven't had to soak beans in a while, or they weren't going through plates like they used to.

When he is not torturing/attending prisoners, Mord seems to have the care of the castle oxen. The whip, and probably the leather strap, are for them, I think. His duties seem identical. Cattle also need clean straw, food, water, mucking out, and someone to harness them to the winch and whip them. There is no stables at the Eyrie, but there should be a cow shed. Or maybe the other sky cells hold the oxen.

The oxen might be shared with the kitchen, too - it would be sensible to have a mixed herd, for winching, meat and dairy, Maddy milks and Mord slaughters, or something like that.

If Mord was responsible for the winch, he would know everything taken up or down by winch to the Eyrie, too. That's not a conflict of interest, putting the guy who is responsible for securing the cells in charge of the primary means of getting things into and out of the Eyrie.

It seems less than ideal to put an illiterate in charge of the supplies for the Eyrie, too. This seems to be a logistically complex job, with those unnecessarily big granaries (give the Eyrie is effectively a summerhouse), and the big moves in the spring and the autumn, and the way day to day supplies of the Eyrie skeleton staff get punctuated with irregular but momentous happenings like the Lady Lysa fleeing Kings Landing with her entire household staff in the dead of night, or the hastily planned but beautifully put together breakfast on the day of Tyrion's trial.

As purser/purser's assistant, Mord would liaise with Mya as well as Maddy, as Mya would be the one getting supplies to Sky, and any new cattle, as well.

Incidentally, is it Mya that fetches the pewter plates Mord flings onto the roof of Sky? Picks up Sansa's missing slipper? When a prisoner answers the call of the blue, who has to get up and clean the red splotches from the unmortered stone roof of Sky, again?

Even supposing the cleanup was left to the falcons, the guards and castellan of Sky would have to know, and Mya too, constantly traversing the pass as she is, watchful for any new thing that might pose a risk to her mules.

Apart from Mya, Maddy, and Tyrion, the only people we see Mord working with are Ser Lothar Brune and 'two serving men'. These might be the only two in the household, or there might be a few pairs, I'm not sure.

I'm fairly sure the serving men are not Carrot and Ossy, the mule handlers, as they are more likely to have come up from Lord Nestor's household, and be under Mya. Still, before Petyr became Lord Protector, there had been at least 'a score' of men guarding and serving at the Eyrie, with more implied.

Even in the reduced household Lady Lysa has after she becomes Mrs Littlefinger, there seems to be about six men for every woman lurking in the background.

Unless, even though its towers could house five hundred men (AGoT,Ch.34 Catelyn VI), every mention of guards at the Eyrie, like every mention of the serving men, refers to the same two men.

In that case, after Lord Baelish arrives, the staff are: Lothar Brune as Master of Arms, the plump septon, Maester Coleman, Terrance Lynderley and Gyles Grafton as Lord Robert's squires, two guards, two serving men, and Mord, as well as Maddy, Gretchel, Mela, and a cook of indeterminate gender.

There have been a lot of dismissals: half a dozen household knights, former Master at Arms Ser Marwyn Belmore and his two sons, the son of the late Ser Vardis, too. The puppeteer in Motley, the whipping boy, the page that dobbed on Marillion, the knights of the broken lance, green viper, burning tower, winged chalice, the two squires that attended Ser Vardis, the two serving girls that dobbed on Marillion, Lysa's ladies maid, Alayne's old maid, and (not technically servants at the Eyrie) the named suitors, their squires and hangers-on.

It is hard to understand how Mord keeps his job, when so many capable people are dismissed. Even with their reduced staff, it seems to me that the two guards could take it in turns to do the gaoler part of his job, and Carrot or Ossy could help the two man-servants with the hauling and oxen management part of it, if there was too much for them to manage on their own.

Mord is such a questionable character. I am sort of half-hoping he does go to Casterley Rock to get the rest of what Tyrion owes him.

 

[Melisandre's White Pubes]

They seem like a really bad idea if your prisoner has friends with access to flying mounts…or the featherfall spell.

[thelittledragonthatcould]

On 27/01/2016 at 10:46 AM, Equilibrium said:

It is great actually.

As Arryns would say "Oh, you claim you are innocent and have proofs, great, as I am honorable and high as fuck I will not just execute innocent man, you will have just trial, I have a place for you to wait for the said trial. Just one thing suicide will be taken as admission of guilt and accidental fall will be taken as suicide"

 

Yeah, in a world that believes you are innocent if you or your champion can prove it in battle surely this is just another 'will of the gods' type scenario. The guilty will fall to their death and the innocent will survive and be freed.

[Trigger Warning]

Probably a bit less brutal than most medieval dungeons. 

Why bother torturing people you're going to kill anyway? 

Plenty of reasons, one of them being they simply enjoy making their enemies or criminals suffer. 

Seeing if you can make them kill them-self through psychological torture probably pleases some lords more than an axe.

[Dorian Martell]

On 1/27/2016 at 2:01 AM, TerrorVoid said:

Just thinking about it: You put in prison only those people who you want to see alive. If you want them dead, so why bother? 
But if you want someone alive, those cells, driving people to suicide are just awful. You can't keep hostages, you can't keep small criminals. You will execute big criminals anyway. If person's fate is not decided, you are just driving possibly innocent person to suicide.

 

What do you guys think? 

The sky cells are only in the eyrie, so you have to commit a crime WAY up in the mountains to get in there. 

I am sure there are plenty of other cells in the Vale to put someone you do not want dead 

[Lord Lannister]

On 1/27/2016 at 6:11 AM, Free Northman Reborn said:

Would be kind of cool if they imprison someone like Jarl the Climber in one, and he proceeds to climb his way out of it.

What you think you can climb? That's cute. Mord, break his fingers before putting him into one of the Sky Cells.

[Veloknight]

On 1/27/2016 at 5:59 AM, SeanF said:

The cells are a subtle form of psychological torture.

Not that subtle....

[Melisandre's White Pubes]

3 hours ago, Lord Lannister said:

What you think you can climb? That's cute. Mord, break his fingers before putting him into one of the Sky Cells.

80% chance that someone is rescued from the Sky Cells by a dragon rider.  20% chance that someone in the Sky Cells is killed by a dragon rider.

That was supposed to be reply to who you were replying to, btw.