Central Pathway Register

The Central Pathway Register is a bound ledger maintained within the office of the Grand Registrar and recognised throughout the Tower as the definitive record of every certified pathway, stair, ramp, ladder, and transitional aperture connecting one numbered floor to another. It is not to be confused with the Central Dimensional Register, which records sequence numbers for Core Identifiers, nor with the Central Wall-Register, which concerns partitions and vertical dividers. The Central Pathway Register is horizontal in purpose and ambulatory in function.

Composition and method

The Register is kept in fifty-one folio volumes, each corresponding to a stratum — a band of floors whose numbering cannot otherwise be reconciled. Entries are made in iron-gall ink by clerks of the Directorate of Conditional Pathway Maintenance, who alone hold the right of inscription. Each entry records the pathway's designation, its origin floor, its terminus floor, its conditional parameters, and the seal of the official who last inspected it. Marginalia are not permitted. Clerks who wish to remark upon an entry must submit a separate schedule, known as a memorial, which is filed beside the volume but never inside it.

Inscription is slow by design. A single pathway may occupy an entire morning, and the Registrar's Office reports that no volume has ever been completed within a single clerk's tenure.

Relationship to the Pathway Audit

The Register is the ordinary instrument through which a Pathway Audit is discharged. When a panel convenes for any significant modification to a pathway's conditional parameters, its findings are not entered directly; instead the panel issues a certificate, which is copied into the Register by a clerk who was not present at the audit. This separation is intended to prevent what the Second Concordance calls "the contamination of the record by its witness." Whether it achieves this is disputed. Librarian Adelfo Vantry, in his survey of the Directorate, observed that the copying clerk is nonetheless a witness to the certificate, "and so the chain of contamination is lengthened rather than broken" (Observationes on the Duties of Copying Clerks, 1149).

The Grievance of Clerk Tanmerrow

Disputes over the Register tend to be quiet, lengthy, and concerned with numbering. The best known is the grievance of Clerk Osia Tanmerrow, who in the winter of 1187 was instructed to inscribe a pathway on Floor 47 and found that the terminus she had been given did not exist in any stratum. Rather than leave the entry unfinished — which the standing orders forbid — she recorded the terminus as "pending", drew a line beneath it, and closed the volume. The line was interpreted by the Office of Normative Pathways as an amendment to the folio's boundary. Two subsequent audits of Floor 47 proceeded on that reading, and the Central Vibration Register was compelled to renumber three of its subsections. Tanmerrow's grievance, submitted in 1191 and still unresolved, argues that a line is not an amendment. The Index of Unresolved Imperatives lists it under the heading "Lines, Uses Of."

The Two Recensions

Scholars distinguish two recensions of the Register. The Long Recension, held at the Registrar's Office, retains superseded entries in place with a single line struck through them. The Short Recension, a working copy circulated to the Directorate, omits superseded entries entirely and depends for its authority on a notation in the Index of Superseded Clauses. Which is authoritative is a matter of open disagreement. The Third Concordance, Annex 2, holds that "a struck entry remains an entry, and speaks," while the Seventh Concordance, Annex 9, holds that "what is struck does not speak, and the Short Recension is therefore silent where silence is meant." The contradiction has never been resolved, and the Lower Register — which supersedes conflicting floor numbers in the Central Wall-Register for materials within the Lower Reaches — has been invoked in argument on both sides without settling it.

"The Register records what may be walked. What may not be walked is the business of other offices."

— Grand Registrar Ilva Marn, opening address to the Directorate, 1204

Current holdings

The Register presently comprises fifty-one volumes, of which forty-nine are complete, one is in progress, and one is missing. The missing volume, folio thirty-eight, was last signed out in 1162 to a clerk recorded only as "B., of the upper floors." Enquiries continue at intervals. The following schedule was appended to the Registrar's annual report:

• Volumes I–XXXVII: complete, sealed, and held at the Registrar's Office.
• Volume XXXVIII: unaccounted for since 1162.
• Volumes XXXIX–L: complete and sealed.
• Volume LI: in progress; the current clerk has reached the ninth gap of the fourth stratum.

Visitors wishing to consult the Register are asked to leave their boots at the door of the reading room, as the floor there is original.