Archivist-Scribe Valen

Archivist-Scribe Valen (fl. Tower Year 6,120 – 6,288) was a cataloguing officer of Floor 112, remembered chiefly for the petition of de-accession concerning the Whispering Atlas and for the singular procedural exception granted to their accessions, which are witnessed rather than autographed. Valen is the earliest recorded bearer of the name on that floor and is not to be confused with the later Archivist-Luminary Valen, whose calendar revision postdates them by two millennia, nor with Valen Karr, who succeeded to the Chief Cartography of Ephemeral Phenomena in a different spiral entirely.

Their career is unusually well documented for a Scribe of the inner floors, chiefly because the dispute they began outlived them by ninety-one years and generated a paper trail no subsequent recension has been willing to prune.

The Floor 112 appointment

Valen was raised to the Scribe's bench on Floor 112 in Tower Year 6,120, in the third quarter, under warrant countersigned by the then-Keeper of the Fifth Annex. The appointment record is short and, in one respect, irregular: the autograph panel is blank. Where the candidate's hand should appear, the scribe on duty — one Halvden, no relation to the cartographer of the same name — wrote witnessed, not signed, and the warrant was sealed regardless.

This was not an error. The Autograph Rule of the Second Concordance requires each accession to bear the hand of the officer who performed it. The Rule admits exceptions only where a candidate's name is itself in question, and Valen's was: the appointment fell in the same season as a general audit of name-bearing on the inner spiral, and the auditor's finding, never formally withdrawn, held that the surname could not be confirmed against a living register. The Office of the Archivist-General accordingly entered the exception at the bottom of the warrant in smaller hand than the rest. Valen's accessions were witnessed thereafter, by two clerks of the Floor, and the practice descended with the desk rather than with the person. Floor 112 still witnesses.

The Whispering Atlas

The holding on which Valen's reputation rests is the Whispering Atlas, a bound volume of forty-one plates in which the marginalia are audible at a distance of not more than one arm's length. Valen catalogued it in Tower Year 6,233 and almost immediately petitioned the Archon for its de-accession, on the ground that a map which speaks cannot be corrected.

The reasoning, set out in the petition at length, is characteristic of the officer and worth quoting:

"A plate that answers back is not a record of a place. It is a second witness, and the Tower does not accession witnesses. I have corrected the ninth plate four times this quarter and on each occasion it has corrected me."

— Archivist-Scribe Valen, Petition to the Archon, Floor 112, Aperture 6

The Archon did not rule. The petition was entered, docketed, and there it remained. It is a point of some irritation on Floor 112 that the Atlas is still there.

The Atlas question and the recensions

Scholars disagree about what Valen actually wanted. The Seventh Recension of the floor registers reads the petition as an ordinary request for removal and notes, sourly, that the Archon's silence constitutes refusal by default under the Fourth Concordance. The Eleventh Recension, working from the same docket and a fuller copy of the petition, argues that de-accession was never Valen's object: that the officer sought only to have the Atlas reclassified as a witness, which would have transferred it from the map shelves to the testimony shelves one storey below, and that the word "de-accession" in the petition heading is the registrar's, not Valen's.

The second reading has the merit of explaining why Valen continued to consult the Atlas for the rest of their tenure while publicly disclaiming it. The first has the merit of being shorter.

A third position, advanced by the Office of Shelf Correction in an internal minute of Tower Year 7,004, holds that the question cannot be settled because the petition's ninth clause was overwritten after sealing and now reads in two hands.

Later tenure and the witnessed method

Valen served Floor 112 for sixty-eight years and accessioned one hundred and forty-three holdings, every one of them witnessed. The method was tested in Tower Year 6,251, when a junior clerk declined to witness, citing the Autograph Rule as still in force for accessions made on the officer's own initiative. The matter reached the Archivist-Superior, who found that the exception travelled with the desk and not the deed, and that the clerk was "to witness as he had witnessed on the previous forty" — a formula still read aloud at the start of each Floor 112 quarter.

Valen's other documentary legacy is the Index of Doubtful Plates, a working register of maps whose correspondence to any floor had ever been questioned. It runs to nine folios and is kept at the desk. The Index may not be taken to the refectory. Valen began it in 6,244 and was still adding to it in the week of their death.

Death, and the witnessed grave

Valen died on Floor 112 in Tower Year 6,288 and was interred in the Lower Ossuary under an inscription followed by two clerk's marks rather than one hand, which the Keeper of the Ossuary permitted without comment. The Halvden register of interments records the entry in the usual form, with the columns for autograph and seal both struck through and the word witnessed entered in the margin.

The petition concerning the Whispering Atlas remains open. It has been carried forward through four recensions and is presently filed with the Standing Docket of Unanswered Petitions, where it is the oldest item on the shelf and, by the Docket's own count, the third most consulted.