Cartographers

Overview

Cartographers is the collective designation for the chartered and quasi-chartered bodies engaged in the measurement, naming, and certification of spaces within the Tower. The term is descriptive rather than juridical: no single instrument defines who is or is not a Cartographer, and Cartographers' Auxiliary records suggest the question has been deliberately left open since at least the Eleventh Concordance. In practice a Cartographer is anyone whose work has been entered, however briefly, into the register of survey — a body of some four thousand names, of which roughly nine hundred are believed to be currently alive.

The cartographic professions are organised into guilds, of which fourteen hold standing charters and an indeterminate number hold Precedent Charters of disputed force. Relations among them are governed by Third Concordance, which recognises the guilds as "competent in their several spheres" without specifying the spheres.

The Guild Structure

The senior guilds divide the survey of the Tower by method rather than by territory, which is unavoidable given that the Tower's territory is not sequential. The Guild of Formal Cartographers concerns itself with geometry and the drafting of bounda: its charter is the oldest in continuous operation and serves as parent to the Acoustic Cartographers' Guild, which charts spaces by resonance, and to the Architectural Cartographers' Guild, which charts the structures that contain other spaces.

Adjacent to these stand the guilds of interpretation. The Metaphorical Cartographers' Guild traces conceptual and genealogical lineages rather than distances, and its practising membership — the Metaphorical Cartographers — is sometimes counted among the surveyor bodies and sometimes excluded from them, a question the guild itself declines to settle. The Skeptical Cartographers’ Guild was founded from the disaffected margins of the Guild of Formal Cartographers and has spent two centuries arguing that most of the others are mapping nothing.

Below these, the Expeditionary Cartographers' Guild validates spaces as Tertiary Instrumentals and produced the Map of Last Tuesday; the Vertical Cartographers' Guild administers the Tuned Aeolian Shafts jointly with the stairwardens; and the Analytical Cartographers reduce all prior surveys to columns of figures, a practice the Guild of Precedent Cartographers has formally condemned twice.

The Schism of the Independent Cartographers

The most consequential division in the profession dates from the winter of the fourth recension, when a body of surveyors refused to accept the standing of the Guild of Precedent Cartographers and the Metaphorical Cartographers' Guild and withdrew to work unaffiliated. They styled themselves the Independent Cartographers, a name the established guilds have never conceded, though the Seventeenth Concordance refers to them by it in a marginal note.

The schism was provoked less by doctrine than by filing. The Independents maintained that a survey entered by a guild could not be used to validate the guild's own later surveys, and that citation had become circular. The Librarians ruled on the matter in the Ordinance of Reciprocity, which forbade internal validation but permitted guilds to validate one another in rotation. The Independents objected that rotation is itself a form of arrangement, and the ordinance has not been invoked since the year of the fifth recension, though it has never been repealed.

Methods and Instruments

Cartographic work in the Tower is conducted in standard instrument sets, issued per survey and returned to the Scriptorium of Bounds. A surveyor's kit ordinarily comprises a bound sine-chain, a resonance fork, and a registry key to the appropriate floor lock. Keys are numbered and signed for; the loss of a key requires the surveyor to file a Schedule of Forfeit within nine days, whether or not the key has been found. Three of the fourteen chartered guilds no longer issue keys at all, having lost their allotments in the Redistribution of Locks.

Measurement is further complicated by the fact that the Tower's floors do not run consecutively. The Reality Cartographers’ Guild addressed this by engineering Reality Buffers, which hold a surveyed space in a fixed configuration long enough to be recorded; without buffers, a survey of an upper stairwell taken on a Tuesday may describe an entirely different landing by Thursday. The Buffers are maintained at guild expense and are the single largest item in the Cartographers' Spire accounts.

Disputes

Rivalry among the guilds is continuous but rarely dramatic. The most persistent dispute concerns the Rumour Cisterns and whether their formation is prosodic in cause. The Acoustical Cartographers' Guild holds that it is; the Reality Cartographers’ Guild disputes the claim and has filed objection in each of the last eleven register-years. The Sixth Concordance appears to settle the question in favour of the Acoustical guild, while the Ninth Concordance contains a clause that, read plainly, reverses it.

"Where two guilds assert competence over a single phenomenon, the phenomenon shall be surveyed twice and the surveys filed separately."

— Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, clause 7

The clause has resulted in the Rumour Cisterns being surveyed twice annually by separate parties, neither of which reads the other's returns. Clerk Aurelian Vasp of the registry has noted in a private memorandum, entered into the record by accident in the year of the fourth recension and never withdrawn, that the two surveys have diverged by as much as four hundred feet and that no one has found this remarkable. "Both are correct," Vasp wrote, "and the Cisterns have not heard about it."

Status of the Term

Whether "Cartographer" ought properly to include the Heretical Cartographers remains unresolved. The hereticals, who survey spaces the guilds have declared unmeasurable, are cartographers by practice and not by charter, and are cited by the guilds only when the guilds wish to cite them.

The Cartographers' Auxiliary has objected to the whole classification, arguing in its Memorial of the Unnumbered that the profession is a fiction maintained for convenience of filing and that a more honest designation would be "persons who have been to the fourth floor and back." The Memorial was received, numbered, and shelved. It has been renumbered twice.