Amendment 7-Q/15.3

Amendment 7-Q/15.3 is a correction amendment to the standing survey returns of the Seventh Concordance, appended on 15.3 of the survey cycle in the twelve-hundred-and-eleventh year of the present recension. It is best known for having voided, retroactively and without compensation, the survey returns of forty-one floors whose numbers had been recorded in what the amendment calls "the incorrect hand." Its formal designation under Concordance Amendment Tracking is a Second-Order Survey Correction, a rank it shares with only six other instruments.

Origin in the Long Survey

Between the fourth and eleventh years of the current recension, the Office of Standing Surveys conducted a partial enumeration of floors between the nine-hundredth and the fourteen-hundredth vertical range. The enumeration was performed by six survey parties working in overlapping intervals, a practice later criticized by the Bureau of Vertical Arithmetic as "a recipe for forty-one small disasters" — a phrase attributed to Surveyor-Adjutant Mirenne Halloway, who supervised parties three and four.

The returns from four parties were submitted in the hand of Clerk Orsinal Vey, a scribe of the Lower Scriptorium whose upright cursive was regarded throughout the Tower as exemplary. The returns from parties one and two were submitted in the secretary hand of Clerk Dellwen Ashe, which is legible but leans left. When the returns were collated for the Seventh Concordance, the collator — whose name is not recorded, and whose silence on the matter has been noted by Amendment Logging — reconciled discrepancies between the two hands by preferring the upright. The result was that the returns of parties one and two were overwritten in the upright hand during recension, and the originals destroyed.

The Correction and Its Terms

Amendment 7-Q/15.3 was drafted by the Standing Committee on Survey Fidelity after Ashe petitioned, unsuccessfully, for the restoration of her submissions. Its operative clause states:

"Where a survey return has been transcribed into a hand not its own, the number recorded shall be held provisional for a period of not less than nine survey cycles, and the floor shall be counted as uncatalogued for all purposes, including toll and footfall."

— Seventh Concordance, Amendment 7-Q/15.3, clause 2

The clause's reference to toll and footfall caused immediate difficulty. The Tollwardens' Concordance had assessed the forty-one floors in question on the basis of their recorded numbers, and the reassessment demanded by 7-Q/15.3 returned a shortfall of some eleven thousand marks. The Court of Seals ruled in the following year that the amendment could not be applied to assessments already sealed, a decision the Committee described in a memorandum as "a reading generous to those who owe money."

Dispute Over Scope

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns whether 7-Q/15.3 was intended to govern only the Long Survey or all returns thereafter. The Bureau of Vertical Arithmetic maintains that the amendment is confined by its preamble to "the survey then in hand," and cites Amendment 12-b, which established that corrective annexes do not travel beyond their originating instrument. Against this, the Office of Standing Surveys argues that clause 4, which speaks of "any future return of similar defect," plainly extends the rule, and points to the Committee's own minute-book, where the drafter wrote that the amendment "should not need a sequel."

The dispute has never been resolved. Amendment Trajectory Forecasting records at least three later amendments that assume one reading and two that assume the other, and the Concordance Amendment Tracking register carries the amendment under both "confined" and "general" headings, with a note reading simply "pending."

Effect on the Lower Floors

The 41 floors affected by the correction remained officially uncatalogued for the full nine cycles. During that period, the Floor Census lists them as blank, though footfall records from the Stairhead Returns show steady traffic throughout. A note appended to the census by an unnamed clerk observes that "the floors were neither counted nor empty," a formulation the Committee declined to strike.

The floors in question were reinstated on 15.3 of the ninth cycle following the correction, with new numbers assigned by the Bureau of Vertical Arithmetic. Four of the new numbers matched floor numbers already in use in the nine-hundredth range. Consolidation of the duplicates is scheduled for the Third Recess of the present cycle. Visitors to the affected floors are asked to leave the landing lamp burning until the stairwell is formally reassigned.

Legacy

Clerk Ashe's petition was eventually granted in part by Amendment 22, which recognized that destroyed originals constitute a category of loss distinct from error. The amendment's celebrated provision on provisional nullity, however, was later narrowed by Amendment 12-b and again by Amendment 14-f, leaving Ashe's successors with a recognition of loss and no remedy for it. The Concordance 441 Amendment 7 adopted the Ashe standard for its own survey returns, and the Nineteenth Concordance Amendment 7 extended it further, though without citing 7-Q/15.3 by name.

The amendment is read aloud in full at the opening of each survey cycle, a practice instituted by the Committee in the second year after its passage and discontinued, without notice, some years later.