Certification of Integrated Sigils

Certification of Integrated Sigils is the administrative procedure by which a composite sigil — one assembled from two or more certified components — is itself declared certifiable as a single instrument. The procedure is governed jointly by Standard Certification and by the residual clauses of Third Concordance, Annex 4, and is distinguished from the certification of simple sigils chiefly by the requirement that each component be certified before integration and then certified again, in its integrated state, afterward. The second certification does not supersede the first. Both are retained. A fully integrated sigil of Class II therefore carries, on average, between four and eleven certification marks, depending on how many times it has been re-seated.

The practice originates in the Certification Block reform of the middle recensions, when it became apparent that a Buttress Sigil bonded to a Pressure-Gradient Sigil could pass inspection as two conforming instruments and fail as one. The Guild of Resonant Masons has argued since at least the winter of 704 that the second certification is redundant where the first was witnessed by a Mason, a position the Librarians have never formally rebutted and have never once acted upon.

The two-stage requirement

Integration is defined in Annex C, clause 9(ii) as "the permanent or semi-permanent joining of two certified sigils such that the operation of either is conditioned by the presence of the other." The definition is deliberately broad. It captures the lamination of a Tonal Sigil onto a Diagnostic Sigil, the etching of an Operational Sigil into the margin of a Delta Sigil, and — following the ruling of 691-γ, which surprised nearly everyone — the practice of storing two sigils in the same tin.

The second certification is performed by an officer of the Certifying Scriptorium who did not witness the integration. This is the so-called blind second, and it is the source of most of the procedure's delay. The Scriptorium maintains that an integrating clerk cannot be trusted to certify their own join; the integrating clerks maintain that a certifying officer who did not see the join cannot know what they are certifying. Both positions are recorded, both are correct, and neither has been withdrawn.

Marking and the aperture allowance

Upon successful second certification, the integrated instrument receives an aperture mark — a small open square, struck to the left of the primary certification mark — indicating that the instrument is certified as a whole and not merely as its parts. Aperture marks are struck in Memoria Chalk where the substrate will not take ink. The chalk specification is set out in Third Concordance, Annex 4, and has not been amended since, although the Annex itself has been amended four times on other matters.

An integrated sigil may carry no more than three aperture marks. Instruments requiring a fourth are broken down and re-integrated under a fresh Certification Block, a rule introduced after the Whorl Incident, in which a laminated assembly of Pressure-Gradient Sigils accumulated nine aperture marks and was subsequently found to have been certifying itself. The Whorl-Spiral Motif carried by that assembly was ruled inadmissible as evidence in its own certification, a decision upheld on appeal and cited whenever the question arises.

Dispute: the status of Annex Omega

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns the tolerances formerly set out in Annex Omega of the Sixth Concordance. Annex Omega specified a wider tolerance for the second certification than Annex C allows — three gradations rather than one — and for sixty years was the working standard in the lower scriptoria. Following the Resolution of 712-δ, the tolerances and certification loops of Annex Omega were fully integrated into Annex Epsilon, and Omega was closed.

The Recursive Certification School holds that the Resolution transferred Omega's tolerances into Epsilon entire, and that a second certification performed to Omega tolerance remains valid. The Scriptorium holds that the Resolution transferred the tolerances but not the grandfathering, and that Omega-toleranced certificates issued before 712-δ are void unless re-struck. Clerk Amaranth Vey, who drafted the Resolution's schedule and later regretted it, recorded the minority view thus:

"The tolerances went across. Nothing else went across. I have been asked to say otherwise for nineteen years and have declined."

— Clerk Amaranth Vey, marginal note to the Schedule of 712-δ

In practice the dispute is settled floor by floor. Floors 214 through 219 accept Omega-toleranced certificates without comment; floor 220 does not; floor 221 accepts them on Tuesdays. No Concordance addresses this.

Records and retention

Every integrated certification generates a docket, which is filed in triplicate: one copy to the Certifying Scriptorium, one to the integrating workshop, and one to the Chromatic Registry, which has no stated use for it. The Registry's copies are stored in the order received and are not indexed, a circumstance that has made the Registry the Tower's de facto authority on which sigils were integrated and when, since no other record is complete.

Dockets are retained indefinitely. They may not be removed from their floor of filing, and may not be copied onto Tactile Sigil blanks, which are reserved.

Standing prohibitions

Three prohibitions attach to the procedure and are repeated verbatim on every docket form. An integrated sigil may not be certified while wet. An integrated sigil may not be certified in the presence of the instrument it is intended to condition. And no officer may certify an integration they have previously declined to certify, notwithstanding any subsequent alteration to the instrument, unless the alteration is total.

The third prohibition was added after the affair of Sigil Alpha, where an officer declined an integration in the morning, certified it in the afternoon following the addition of a single aperture mark, and spent the following four years defending the decision in writing. The defense runs to two hundred and six pages. It is, by common consent, the clearest account of the procedure anyone has produced.