Candlelight Watch Protocols

The Candlelight Watch Protocols are the standing body of procedural instruction governing the Candlelight Watch in the discharge of its audit functions. They are not a single document. The Protocols comprise forty-one separate instruments — schedules, standing orders, marginal annotations raised to the status of instruction by Fourth Concordance, Annex 2 — accumulated since the Watch's formalization at the ratification of the Decree of Austere Function in the winter of the year recorded as 3,904 by the Registry of Undischarged Years. No complete recension is known. The Scriptorium of the Ninth Landing holds thirty-eight of the forty-one instruments; the remaining three survive only as citations in the work of others, which the Protocols themselves permit, provided the citation is repeated verbatim.

Scope and standing

The Protocols apply to every station at which the Watch is required to maintain illumination, to every exposure of photophobic holdings, and to all sequesterings conducted under the Eidetic Recollection. They bind Watch-Clerks and Watchers alike, though the two are addressed in different grammatical persons, a distinction the Candlelight Watch has never explained and now observes out of habit. Thirty-Second Concordance, Annex 7, Clause 2 provides that where a Protocol and a Concordance disagree, the Concordance prevails; the Protocols have been amended eleven times on this basis and have never been withdrawn.

The luminance schedule

Protocol 9 fixes the permitted luminance at any Watch Station at between 11 and 14 candela at the reading desk, and not less than 8 candela at the threshold. The schedule is expressed in Watch Candle-fractions rather than in absolute units, since the Watch holds that a standard candle is the only measure that does not itself require a light to read. Deviation below 8 candela at the threshold is a Class Two resonance fault and is reported to the Oscillation Watch within the same watch; deviation above 14 candela is not a fault but an irregularity, and requires only a note.

Protocol 9 was revised after the affair of Floor 11,208, where the earliest attested instance of Liquid Silence was recorded during a routine exposure. The Watch's own report attributed the incident to a desk lamp of non-Watch manufacture that had been left burning in the antechamber. The lamp was not confiscated. The Protocols were amended to prohibit desk lamps at Watch Stations, which the Watch had until then considered too obvious to require stating.

Vocal and resonant procedure

Because the Watch is charged with vocal and resonant anomalies, Protocols 17 through 23 set out how a Watcher is to speak while on watch. Speech is to be kept below the resonance threshold of the station's own fabric, determined once at commissioning and recorded on the station plaque. Reading aloud from the Luminosity Index is permitted. Humming is not. Whistling is a Class One fault and has been since Protocol 19, following an incident on Floor 4,077 in which a Watcher's whistle was entered in the Index as an anomalous source and stood in the record for sixty years before it was traced.

"A sound made by the Watch is not a sound the Watch is watching. The distinction is maintained by the Watcher, not by the instrument."

— Candlelight Watch Protocols, Protocol 19, opening sentence

Where a resonant anomaly is confirmed, the Watcher is to strike the station bell once and continue the watch without interruption. The Great Clock marks the beginning and end of the watch proper and is not to be anticipated by the station bell; the two have been confused twice, both times by newly appointed Watchers, both times at Watch 88-Omega.

The Sconce Protocol and its disputes

Protocol 34 governs the Arclight Sconces during sequestering and is the most litigated instrument in the body. It requires the Sconces to be held at a specified luminance for the whole of the sequestering, but specifies the figure only in an appendix that has been recopied with a smudged numeral since at least the Fifth Recension. The Watch maintains that the figure is 40 candela. The Chandlers' Guild, which supplies the sconces, maintains that it is 46, and has declined to supply at 40 on the grounds that a sconce burned at 40 is a sconce wasted.

The dispute was referred to the tripartite review process for luminous anomalies and remains there. A clerk of the Scriptorium of the Ninth Landing, Ossia Vane, proposed in her marginalia of the year 3,918 that the numeral be read as "40, or as near thereto as the wax permits," a formulation the Watch adopted and the Guild has never accepted. Vane's marginalia were raised to standing instruction by Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, which is the only reason the matter is not still open on the page.

Interaction with other watches

The Protocols defer to Coherence Monitoring in all matters of measurement and to the Materialization Watch wherever a luminous anomaly is accompanied by materialization; final oversight in such events is shared, under Protocol 38, and the sharing is arranged by correspondence rather than by any joint instrument, which has caused delay. During the Equilibrium Tide the Protocols remain in force without alteration, the Watch being expressly exempt from the period of administrative stillness. The Chronophage Candle is excluded from all luminance calculations under Protocol 41 and is not to be lit at a Watch Station for any purpose, including the checking of other candles.

Observance

Compliance is audited by the Watch itself, which is the arrangement Second Concordance, Annex 4, Clause 12 anticipated and no Concordance has since improved upon. Watchers are required to initial the station plaque at the close of each watch. The initials are not compared with anything. They are kept because Protocol 1 says they are kept, and Protocol 1 has never been amended.