Apprenticeship Roll

The Apprenticeship Roll is the primary register of bound apprenticeships undertaken within the Tower, maintained in the Office of Indentures on floor 314 (Binder's Rest) and amended, on average, one hundred and forty times a day. It records the name of each apprentice, the trade to which they are bound, the master under whom they serve, the floor of indenture, the anticipated term, and—where applicable—the manner in which the apprenticeship was concluded, suspended, or abandoned. It is distinct from the Master Roll of Primary Registrants, which records persons in their own right; an apprentice appears in the Apprenticeship Roll before they appear anywhere else, and many never appear anywhere else at all.

The Roll is bound in three volumes at any given time, with a fourth held in reserve for years in which the number of new indentures exceeds eleven thousand. It has exceeded eleven thousand in every year since the current cycle began.

Origin and recensions

The Roll's founding is attributed to Librarian Osmer Vell, who is said to have opened the first volume on floor 314 with forty-one names entered in a single afternoon and to have spent the following decade regretting it. The earliest surviving recension is the Fourth Recension, dated to the winter of the year the East Unbound Stacks were closed for re-shelving; it records indentures in a hand that modern registrars describe as "legible to its author." The Seventh Recension is the working text. The Eighth Recension has been in preparation since a date that the Office of Indentures declines to state, and two of its projected annexes remain blank.

Recensional disputes are frequent. The Guild of Verticality maintains that certifications granted under the Sixth Recension are invalid for the purposes of certification, since the Sixth omitted the floor designation from its columns; the Office of Indentures maintains the contrary, holding that a floor may be inferred from the master's habitual residence, and that in any case no one has requested such an inference since the Forty-Seventh Concordance was amended to permit residence on stairwells. The matter was referred to Arbiter Calix and remains referred.

Entry and the Indenture Clerk

An indenture is entered in the Roll by the Indenture Clerk of the day, on presentation of a sealed writ from the master and a countersignature from the apprentice's sponsor. The Roll of Clerks Ordinary lists the Indenture Clerks under a separate heading; Clerk Theobold served as Indenture Clerk for a period in the winter of the year the Roll was relocated, and his entry—number 14,307—bears a marginal note in his own hand that reads, in full: "No one told me there would be three." The note has never been explained or removed.

Presentations must be made in person. Proxy indentures are permitted under the Twenty-Second Concordance only where the apprentice is resident below floor 900, in which case the writ may be carried by a Resonant Scribe and countersigned at the point of descent. Apprentices bound in this manner are recorded with a sigma mark beside their names, and the sigma must be entered before the name rather than after it, though as the Office of Indentures notes in its standing guidance, "it is often not."

Concluded, suspended, and unaccounted terms

Apprenticeships terminate in four ways: completion, release, transfer, and silence. Completion is recorded with the master's seal and the date; release with the sponsor's; transfer by a fresh sealed writ naming the new master, who must be of the same trade and a floor above or below the original. Silence is recorded where the apprentice's whereabouts are unknown for a continuous period exceeding the term of the indenture. Silenced apprentices remain on the Roll. They are not removed, and their entries are not annotated. The Office of Indentures regards removal as a form of assertion.

Silences cluster. The Ephemeris of Latent Intersections records a notable concentration on the stair between floors 711 and 714, where eleven apprentices bound to toolcraft under the Fifth Weight were recorded as silent within the space of a single winter. Under the Thirty-Ninth Concordance, certification for master toolcrafters requires apprenticeship under a Librarian of the Fifth Weight; the eleven have consequently been certified in absentia, on the reasoning that the requirement concerns the apprenticeship, not the apprentice. The certifications were issued, sealed, and delivered to the Roll's custody, where they remain.

Relation to the other rolls

The Apprenticeship Roll is subsidiary to no other register, and the fact is a source of persistent irritation to the Office of the Master Roll, which holds that an apprentice is a person and ought therefore to be entered in the Master Roll of Primary Registrants from the first day of indenture. The Office of Indentures holds that an apprentice is a term. The two offices have not exchanged correspondence since the Nineteenth Concordance was amended to require that each roll "acknowledge the other where acknowledgement is owed"—a formula neither office has chosen to interpret.

Apprentices who complete their term and are granted habitation appear subsequently in the Citizen Roll, which is itself subsidiary to the Master Roll of Primary Registrants. Those bound to the Resonant Scribes are not recorded in the Apprenticeship Roll at all, but in the guild's own seven-year register, a practice defended under the Concordance of Separate Registers and resented by the Office of Indentures, which points out that the separate register is not a roll and has never been called one. Apprentices bound to scribal trades pass through the Department of Epistemic Cartography for the marking of their anticipated floors, and those whose anticipated floor cannot be assigned are entered in the Roll with a delta mark, in red, at the foot of the page. The red is not decorative.

Custody and access

The Roll is consulted at the desk only, in the presence of the Indenture Clerk, and may not be copied in full. Partial copies are permitted for named apprentices and are issued under the Master Sigil Ledger with a sigil of their own. The desk is closed on the first day of each month for cleaning. Apprentices seeking sight of their own entries must bring their sponsor; where the sponsor is dead or silent, the entry is read aloud to the apprentice by the Clerk from behind a screen, and the apprentice may not correct it.