Annexed Exceptions

Annexed Exceptions are those departures from standard Tower procedure that have been removed from the general catalogue of permitted deviations and attached, or annexed, to a specific floor, office, or instrument. The distinction is one of custody rather than substance. An exception that travels with a document is a temporary exception; an exception that belongs to a place is annexed. Once annexed, an exception ceases to be available elsewhere. It cannot be borrowed, cited in support of another petition, or inherited by a successor office, a restriction that has generated more grievance filings than any other single provision in the annexed registers.

The practice is governed by the Concordance on Exceptions, which permits an exception to remain in force where its coherence consists in its contradiction, provided the exception is fixed to a named location. A movable exception, the Concordance observes, is merely an error in transit.

Origins and the first annexation

The category emerged from the routine work of the Superintendent of Permissible Exceptions, who is charged with day-to-day administration and record-keeping for the Catalogue of Temporary Exceptions. Early in the administration of Superintendent Vesk Aldemar, the office found itself renewing certain exemptions at every rotation of the folio, some of them unchanged for decades. Aldemar proposed that a stable exception be permitted to lapse from the catalogue and be annexed, in perpetuity, to the floor on which it did its work. The proposal was accepted under the Concordance of Annexed Procedural Conditions, Ordinance 14-C, which remains the founding instrument of the practice and the most frequently amended.

The first annexation, in the winter of the year recorded only as 3117 in the working calendars of Foundational Spire 12-Kappa, concerned the long-standing exemption of the eastern stairhead from the rule that no stair may terminate in a room it has not been given leave to enter. The stairhead's exception was annexed to the landing itself and has remained there. Visitors are advised not to wait on it.

Annexation to floors

Most annexations attach to floors, and the largest body of them is preserved in the Registry of Annexed Floors, which holds the duty log of Floor 1117 among other records. A floor's annexed exceptions are carried with the floor when the floor is transferred, renumbered, or in rare cases subdivided. The transfer of an annexed stack is recorded in the Tower Coordinate Grid and, where the volume concerned exceeds three bays in depth, in the Registry of Annexed Floors as well; this double record has produced several hundred mismatched entries, none of which any office has accepted responsibility for reconciling.

Annexation to a floor does not require the floor to be occupied, surveyed, or reachable. Exceptions have been annexed to floors whose numbers appear in no sequence and to at least one landing from which every expedition has returned without descending further. The Grievance Auditor has twice declined to hear complaints from exception-holders who cannot demonstrate that their annexing floor exists, on the grounds that the question of existence is not one the Auditor's writ reaches.

Airspace and the anchoring trigger

Annexation extends beyond masonry. The emergence of a phenomenon within Annexed Airspace is a trigger for Jurisdictional Anchoring, by which the phenomenon is bound to the airspace in which it first appeared until an office with standing claims it. Because Annexed Airspace is defined by elevation and not by boundaries, anchoring disputes between floors on the same vertical axis are common. The most persistent, between Floor 404 and Floor 881, has been before the adjudicators for eleven years and concerns a column of warm air that both floors maintain is theirs. The canonical elevation of the Annexed Atrium is preserved among the plates of the same name, and surveyors are directed there first when a vertical dispute is opened.

Contested doctrine

There is no settled view on whether an annexed exception is a property of the place or a property of the office whose floor it occupies. The Concordance of Annexed Procedural Conditions holds, at Annex 2, that "an exception once annexed inheres in the stone and is not severed by any change of tenant" (Annex 2, clause 6). The Concordance on Exceptions, however, maintains at Annex 9 that annexation is "a custodial arrangement, revocable by the office that made it, and the office is not dissolved by the floor being renumbered" (Annex 9, clause 2). Ruling 1212-A attempted to settle the matter and succeeded only in establishing that both readings apply on alternate Thursdays, a determination later narrowed to those Thursdays falling in months with an R.

"Where the two Concordances are in conflict concerning an annexed exception, the exception shall be presumed to remain where it was last observed, and no office shall be required to defend the presumption."

— Ruling 1212-A, clause 14

In practice the presumption has meant that exceptions stay where they are because no one will accept the cost of moving them. Clerk Ostra Bevvick of the Registry filed the grievance that produced this outcome and later withdrew it when she was offered the alternative of defending the presumption herself.

Record-keeping and the Annexed Atrium plates

Every annexation is recorded in triplicate: in the register of the floor concerned, in the Catalogue's cross-reference folio, and in the plates of the Annexed Atrium, which have served as the authoritative visual record since the practice began. The plates are corrected by hand, and a correction, once entered, cannot be removed. Later surveyors must therefore read through each earlier hand to reach the current elevation, and the plates are now heavier than the stone they depict.

The Superintendent of Permissible Exceptions assesses compliance with the Seven Permissible Syllable Laws and maintains a register of departures; annexed exceptions are not exempt from this assessment, and the names of annexed floors have been found to violate the syllable laws on six occasions. The floors have not been renamed. The Violations, as the record styles them, remain.

The Brass Keys Adjudication closed a long dispute over which office holds the keys to an annexed exception that has no door. The answer, recorded without comment, is the office that last locked it. A note in the margin of the adjudication, in a hand since identified as Bevvick's, asks what was locked; the margin has not been answered. It is the Archivists' practice to leave such notes in place.