Adjudicators' Guild

The Adjudicators' Guild is the senior chartered body of declarative parsing within the Tower, claiming ultimate authority over the reading, division, and settlement of statements made in writing on any floor. It is among the oldest guilds of the interior and holds its seat on the Eleventh Landing, in a hall whose east wall is given over to the sealed rolls of its own rulings. The Guild maintains that no declarative statement is complete until an Adjudicator has determined where one claim ends and the next begins; nearly every other office in the Tower has, at some point, disputed this, and none has succeeded in removing the claim from the Guild's charter.

Charter and Jurisdiction

The Guild's founding instrument, the Charter of Declarative Parsing (recension four, held under seal of the Concordance of Seals), grants it oversight of "all division of speech into its constituent assertions, wheresoever such division is required." In practice this means the Guild is consulted whenever a document must be broken into separate claims: wills, floor inventories, petitions, and the enormous ledgers of the Bureau of Precedential Analysis. Its authority is contested chiefly by the Adjudicators of Precedent, who argue that parsing without precedent is mere cutting, and by the Chromatic Adjudicators, whose sub-guild status within the Ink-Mixing Guild the Adjudicators' Guild has never formally conceded.

The Guild's own position on the latter is set out in a standing memorandum of the Sixth Concordance, which observes that "a hue may be judged, but a sentence may only be parsed" (Annex 9, clause 3). The Chromatic Adjudicators have answered this in a counter-memorandum of equal length and no fewer seals, and the quarrel is now in its eleventh decade without a resolution that either side will read.

The Register Question

The Guild's longest-running dispute concerns the Register of Eligible Adjudicators, maintained by the Bureau of Precedential Analysis, from which Adjudicators are drawn for committee service. When the Register was established, the Guild contested its creation on the ground that vetting candidates had been its historic privilege since before the Third Concordance was sealed. The Bureau replied that the Register recorded qualification, not appointment, and that the Guild was free to vet whoever it liked so long as the Register was not amended to say so.

"The Register names the qualified. It does not name the chosen. A guild that confuses the two has mistaken its own convenience for a right."

— Bureau of Precedential Analysis, Reply to the Guild's Petition, 4th recension

The Guild's rejoinder, filed the following winter, runs to forty-one pages and does not distinguish between the two. A compromise was reached in which Guild-vetted names are listed first within each alphabetical division, a concession the Bureau has described as typographical.

Relations with the Bureau of Vital Flux Measurement

Because declarative parsing frequently bears on quantities — how many casks, how many days, how much of a floor is load-bearing — the Guild has clashed repeatedly with the Bureau of Vital Flux Measurement, which claims authority over all statements that include a measurement. The dispute is usually dated to the Winter of the Two Counts, when a Guild Adjudicator parsed a warehouse inventory into eleven assertions and the Bureau, on review, found that two of them were the same assertion counted twice. The Guild holds that the Bureau miscounted the assertions; the Bureau holds that the Guild parsed a number, which is not permitted. Both offices cite the Ninth Concordance and neither has produced the annex in full.

Internal Order and the Grievance of Clerk Venn

The Guild is administered by a Bench of twelve Adjudicators, of whom no more than nine may be present at once. Sub-committees sit on the Fourth Spiral and the Seventeenth Spiral, both of which keep their own minutes. Members are admitted after examination in division, annotation, and the separation of a compound claim under adverse light.

In the winter of the year recorded as 4 1 1, the Guild dismissed the grievance of the clerk Ordel Venn, who had petitioned for reclassification of her post from Annotator to Adjudicator on the ground that she had been parsing for fourteen years without the title. The Bench found that she had been annotating, and that the two are not the same, and that she had been paid correctly throughout. Clerk Venn's petition is preserved in the Guild's archive; a marginal hand, not hers, has written beside the finding "she had." The Guild has declined to open an inquiry into the marginal hand.

Criticism and the Sealed Rolls

The Guild is often accused of resolving nothing. Its defenders reply that a guild of parsing is not required to decide what a claim means, only where it begins and ends, and that the Tower has never suffered a shortage of endings. Critics note that the Guild's sealed rolls have not been opened in two centuries, on the authority of an internal ordinance stating that "a ruling once sealed is parsed no further." Visiting scholars are permitted to examine the seals themselves; touching them is not permitted, and the hall is closed on the last day of each month for the wax's maintenance.

The Board of Concordant Interpretation has twice attempted to review the rolls, and twice been referred to the ordinance. The Board's third request remains, by its own account, pending, and the Guild has no record of receiving it.