Clauses 17-19

Clauses 17–19 are three contiguous provisions of the Precedence Edict Protocol governing the order in which clauses of equal rank are to be read when they conflict. Their numbering is itself an anomaly: the Protocol is styled as running from Clause 12 to Clause 18, yet its terminal provisions are numbered 17, 18, and 19, the last of these falling outside the range the Protocol's title claims. The discrepancy has been noted in every recension since the Ninth Recension of the Edict and has never been corrected, on the ground that correcting it would require a Clause 20.

Contents

Clause 17 establishes the rule of seniority: where two clauses of equal rank conflict, the earlier-ratified prevails. Clause 18 establishes the rule of specificity: where two clauses of equal rank conflict, the narrower prevails. Clause 19 establishes that Clauses 17 and 18 are themselves of equal rank, and provides no rule for resolving conflicts between them.

The three clauses are therefore read together as a single instrument that cannot fail to be internally inconsistent. Procedural scholars refer to this condition, without evident distress, as the standing contradiction.

The Winter Reading on Floor 6,412

The standing contradiction remained a matter of commentary rather than practice until the winter of the year the Tower's heating registers record as "the cold one," when the Office of Supersession Review was asked to settle a dispute between two warehouse inventories on Floor 6,412. The earlier inventory had been ratified in the second month and specified that all crates be counted by volume. The later inventory, ratified in the ninth month, specified that crates on the east side of the floor be counted by weight.

Clause 17 favoured the earlier, volumetric inventory; Clause 18 favoured the later, narrower, weight-based one. The reviewing clerk, Clerk Ambrine Vesk, applied Clause 17, then reconsidered and applied Clause 18, and eventually filed both determinations under a single seal, noting on the docket that she had "found the Protocol to be of two minds and did not wish to interrupt." Her docket note is preserved in the Ledger of Reluctant Determinations, folio 44 recto.

"Where a clause and its neighbour instruct otherwise, the clerk is to proceed as though the clause had not been written, and is to say so in the margin."

— Concordance Five, Clause 1,823

Vesk's marginal note, "both instructions withdrawn for the duration," was subsequently cited as authority in eleven further proceedings before anyone observed that Clause 1,823 concerns rent assessments and has nothing to do with precedence.

Dispute over the Missing Clause 20

Two readings of the numbering predominate. The first, maintained by the Scriptorium of the Lower Spiral and broadly endorsed by the Office of Supersession Review, holds that Clause 19 was appended after the Protocol's original ratification to close an obvious gap, and that the title was never emended because the Index of Superseded Clauses does not list titles among the things it tracks. On this reading Clauses 17–19 form a settled triad and ought to be cited together.

The second reading, advanced by Librarian Ossen Tarr in a paper read to the Assembly of Precedence and never withdrawn, holds that Clause 19 is not a clause at all but a fusion of Clauses 17 and 18 produced by a copyist working too close to a lamp, and that the true Protocol ends at 18. Tarr observed that the third clause's wording is metrically identical to the last lines of both its predecessors, which he took as evidence of dittography. The Scriptorium's reply, that all three clauses are metrically identical because all three were drafted by the same hand on the same afternoon, is generally thought to be the better argument, though Tarr's has never been formally rejected.

Both readings agree on the practical point that Clause 19 resolves nothing, and neither has been able to explain why it was written in a firmer hand than the clauses it follows.

Citations and current practice

Clauses 17–19 are most often cited in full, in order, as a formula — "seventeen through nineteen" — even where only one of the three is relevant. This convention is defended in the Third Concordance, Annex Gamma, which warns that citing a single clause from the triad invites the objection that the citing clerk has not read the other two. The objection is, in practice, unanswerable; the formula allows a clerk to be accused of not reading three clauses instead of one.

Copies of the Protocol remain posted, as required, at the head of each stairwell between Floors 6,000 and 6,500. The posted copies on Floor 6,412 are missing Clause 18. Inquiries have been directed to the floor's inventory clerk, who is not permitted to ascend.