Blood-Inks

Definition and standing

Blood-Inks is a designation recorded in the Master Ledger of Inks for that class of ceremonial pigment whose colour, viscosity, and archival behaviour are held to be governed by the corresponding level of Blood-Inks in the department of application. The designation is not a chemical description; the Ledger's editors have repeatedly declined to specify whether the term denotes composition, effect, or administrative condition, and the resulting ambiguity has been the subject of three separate appeals to the Fourth Concordance.

Blood-Inks is one of the four humours of Archival Humorism, alongside Black Choler, Yellow Choler, and Phlegm. Under the humoral model, a department in which Blood-Inks stood too low produced inscriptions that faded unpredictably, while one in which it stood too high produced inscriptions that spread beyond their ruled margins and, in the recorded case of the Ink-Scriptorium annex on Floor 1148, across two adjoining shelves of bound concordances.

Measurement and adjustment

The annual measurement of Blood-Inks levels was conducted by Humorist Letting, in which ink was drawn from a master logbook and replaced with a corrected volume of approved pigment. The practice was sanctioned under Ordinance Beta, which cites graphite and blood-based pigments as approved media, and was administered until the Annual Reckoning 892 by the Ink-Mixing Guild in conjunction with the Office of Proprietary Inks.

Adjustment was a delicate procedure. The Guild's own manuals warn that a logbook let too far would not accept replacement ink at all, and that the resulting volume had to be introduced in three passes separated by no fewer than nine days. Two known failures of this rule are catalogued in the Annual Reconciliation of Inks, the more frequently cited involving a requisition ledger whose Blood-Inks level was corrected so thoroughly that every subsequent entry for eleven months was legible only under lamplight.

Relation to sanctioned pigments

Whether Blood-Inks constitutes one of the seven sanctioned inks enumerated in the Master Ledger of Inks remains contested. The Ledger's margin notes on the question are themselves written in an ink that no extant sample matches, a fact which the Keeper of Provisional Inks has characterised as "convenient". The Cadre of Fading Inks holds the opposing position, maintaining that Blood-Inks is a property rather than a substance and therefore falls outside the Ledger's remit entirely.

The Wing of Ephemeral Inks has on two occasions attempted to classify Blood-Inks as a Type Gamma ephemeral pigment under the Ordinance on Ephemeral Inks. Both attempts were rejected by Ordinance Kappa-19, which resolved the dispute in favour of the Office of Proprietary Inks without, as the Wing's subsequent memorandum noted, actually stating which of the two offices had prevailed.

Disputes

The principal outstanding disagreement concerns whether a department's Blood-Inks level is measured prior to or after the year's inscriptions are made. The Fourth Concordance takes the former position in Clause 12 and the latter in Annex 4; both citations appear in the current edition of the Type Beta Conditional Phraseology without editorial comment. Under the reading advanced by the Symbiotic Tincture Formulation committee, the level is in fact a rolling average taken across the whole Tower, which would mean that no individual department has ever been observed at its correct value.

"A logbook that records its own level is not a logbook but a party to the dispute."

— Fourth Concordance, Annex 4

The dispute remains formally open. It is expected to be revisited at the next Reckoning.

Visiting and handling

Visitors to the holding stacks where Blood-Inks specimens are stored are reminded that gloves are provided at the antechamber and must be returned there. Specimens may be viewed but not carried up more than one flight of stairs, a restriction attributed variously to spillage, to the temperament of the pigment, and to an incident in the winter of the 734th reckoning that no surviving record describes in full.