Chronal Fugue Ink

Chronal Fugue Ink is a writing medium held in the Certified Archival Ink class and reserved, under the standing practice of the Clerks of the Concordance, for the application of new amendments. It is the only ink in the Tower whose drying is not measured in time but in conditions: properly constituted, it achieves a state the Ink-Subcommittee calls permanent temporal liquidity, by which a line once laid down remains, in the phrasing of Concordance XIX, "open to its own moment, and not yet concluded in any other."

The ink is not used for the copying of existing text. Ink of Finality governs transcription. Chronal Fugue Ink governs revision, and its use is restricted to the brief months in which a Concordance is amended rather than read.

Composition and tempering

The base is a gall medium, related by descent to Ferrous Gall Ink and, more distantly, to Gallstone Ink, but bound with a suspensive agent derived from the residue of stopped clockwork. To this are added measures of Sleeping Ink Proprietary Formulation in the proportion fixed by the Ink-Mixing Guild schedule of 11 Feluka, and it is this admixture that the Guild credits with the ink's characteristic behaviour. The Ink-Scriptorium Supply Line delivers it in sealed stone flagons of two hundred milli-litres, each stamped with the floor of mixing and the hour at which that hour was judged to be correct.

Tempering requires an atmosphere of held stillness, a barometric pressure within two graduations of the standard, and the absence of any striking clock within the scriptorium's hearing. The Vellum Amp Ink Conservatory Administrative Spire maintains three designated tempering chambers for the purpose. Failures are catalogued under Chronal Fabric disturbance, though the Guild disputes the classification.

Effects on the written line

A clause written in properly tempered Chronal Fugue Ink does not sit inertly on the page. Ink-Subcommittee Minute 4,112 records the disposition precisely:

"A line so applied continues to be written in the sense in which it was first intended, though nothing further is added to it, and the eye that reads it is aware of the writing as an act still in progress."

— Ink-Subcommittee, Minute 4,112

Readers report the sensation without difficulty so long as they read only briefly. Sustained reading produces the dissociative temporal displacement catalogued elsewhere as Chronal Fugue, in which the reader perceives an extended internal narrative within a short objective interval. The Registry of Slowed Experience records fourteen such cases among the Clerks of the Pulse in the six years following the introduction of the ink, and the Archivist-Lieutenant Elara Verner is known to have taken an interest in these readings before the incident that bears her name.

Whether Chronal Fugue Ink is therefore a cause of fugue or merely a competent precipitant remains an open question. The distinction is not considered pedantic by the Registry.

Controversy: the annotation of the Ink-Subcommittee

The Ink-Subcommittee holds, on the strength of its own Minute 4,301, that the ink's liquidity is a property of the medium alone, and that any fugue experienced by a reader is a coincidental second effect, properly catalogued under Bibliographic Fugue rather than under the ink's own record. The Clerks of the Concordance reject this in their revised practice note of the Thirtieth Concordance, Annex 3, which states that "the ink is applied to amendments, and an amendment read at the wrong hour is an amendment still being made." The Thirtieth Concordance implies that the reader who fugs has entered the amendment's own moment; the Minute implies the reader has simply lost their place.

The dispute is old enough that both have been cited against one another in the same dispute. In the matter of the disputed floor renumbering of the Ninety-First Spiral, the Clerks cited the Minute in support of one reading and the Annex in support of its opposite within a single submission, a manoeuvre the Librarians declined to correct and which is now taught as the standard illustration of Concordance Collision.

Incidents and maintenance

The most-cited incident remains the Chronal Fugue of 23 Nisan in the Year of the Tarnished Vessel, when amended text laid in Chronal Fugue Ink caused the pulse readings of the Clerks of the Pulse to diverge from the Guild of Resonant Masons', missed Peregrine-Sigma launch windows, and incidentally diverted the Cartographer's Lament. The Nineteenth Concordance was amended by temporary annex to require a second tempering witness for any application exceeding forty lines. A later amendment restored the single-witness rule; a further amendment, dated 3 Pollux, restored the second witness. Both remain in force.

Practical handling is set out in the Clerk's standing instruction: the ink is applied with a pen of hollow bone, never steel, and the flagon must not be opened on a floor whose number has changed within the past year. Spillage is reported to the Ink Provenance Project and, separately, to the clerk on duty, who is expected to remember it.

Since the Sleeping Ink shortage, several scriptoria have petitioned the Ink-Mixing Guild for a substitute at reduced cost. The Guild has declined each petition, on the ground that a substitute would be, by definition, a different ink. This has not stopped its sale.

See also

• Chronal Fugue
• Bibliographic Fugue
• Chronal Fabric
• Certified Archival Ink
• The Petitioner's Ink