Conclave of Concordance

The Conclave of Concordance is the standing body charged with reviewing disputes over the interpretation of Concordance Zero and its numbered successors. It sits in the Assize Chamber on Floor 1187, four landings below the Archivists' Conclave, and convenes on the first and fifteenth of each month unless the fifteenth falls on a day of inventory, in which case the session is held in the corridor. Its rulings are binding on all floors between 400 and 1900 and are regarded as advisory elsewhere, a distinction the Conclave has never accepted and has never been able to remedy.

Membership is by appointment from the Conclave of Scribes, from which mid-senior officials are drawn for the Nomenclature Oversight Conclave and, less frequently, for this body. The Conclave of Concordance sits nineteen: eleven Scribes, four Indexers, and four seats held by the Librarians' Order that are customarily left empty and formally counted as occupied. A quorum is twelve. A quorum of eleven has twice been recorded as twelve by clerks who counted the empty seats, and both records stand.

Jurisdiction

The Conclave hears matters referred to it where two Concordances speak to the same question and neither yields. It does not amend Concordances; that is the work of Concordance Amendment Tracking, which the Conclave regards as a filing office and which regards the Conclave as a delay. It does not adjudicate nomenclature, which belongs to the Nomenclature Oversight Conclave and, on appeal, to a higher body the Conclave has petitioned four times without reply. What it does is narrower and, by the estimate of Chancellor Vert, occupies rather more of the Tower's time than any other proceeding: it decides which of two contradictory clauses was meant.

The Conclave's characteristic instrument is the ruling of void basis — a finding that a claim resting on a Concordance had no legal footing from the outset, and therefore that anything built upon it is to be unwound. The instrument is powerful and rarely used, because unwinding is expensive. In Cycle 899 the Conclave reviewed the conduct of Scribe-Provisional Tylus and ruled that the legal basis for the Sultanate of the Silent Stair was void. The Sultanate had stood for sixty-one years and occupied three floors. The ruling was reviewed and upheld by the Conclave of Three, which commended the Conclave of Concordance for its thoroughness and declined to say what should be done with the floors.

Procedure of the Two Readings

A matter reaches the Conclave by petition, sealed and countersigned. It is read once in the session of receipt and once, not less than thirty days later, in a session at which no other business is taken. Between the readings the petition is displayed in the antechamber so that any party may file an objection, a correction, or a note of support; the last is not provided for in the standing orders but has been accepted since Cycle 874 on the grounds that it does no harm.

Clause I of Concordance Zero is recited in full at the opening of every session, a practice the Conclave shares with the Conclave of Indexers and defends on the grounds of continuity. The recitation takes forty minutes. On Floor 1187 in the winter of Cycle 906 the heating failed and the recitation was abbreviated to its first and last sentences; the session's rulings were later challenged as improperly opened, and the challenge failed by a vote of nine to seven, the seven holding that an abbreviated opening opens nothing.

"A ruling is not less a ruling for having been made cold."

— Chancellor Vert, marginalia to the Assize Register, Cycle 906

Disputes and Contradictions

The Conclave's own authority is not settled. The Forty-Fourth Conclave, which maintains the reading of Concordance 44, holds that Clause 147.22 of Concordance 147 was superseded before it was ever applied and that the Conclave of Concordance has been enforcing a dead clause for two centuries. The Conclave's answer, recorded in its standing reply of Cycle 881, is that a clause is not dead while it is being enforced. The Forty-Fourth Conclave has not accepted this and has not stopped filing.

A second disagreement concerns the count. The Conclave's register numbers its rulings continuously from the first session; Concordance Reconciliation maintains a parallel numbering that diverges from the Conclave's own at ruling 3,114 and has never converged. Practitioners cite one or the other according to which they can find in the dark. The Vault of Irreconcilable Holdings keeps both registers and, by its own charter, may not prefer either.

Records and Seals

Rulings are entered in the Assize Register, sealed with the Conclave's device — a stair descending into a closed book — and copied within the fortnight to the Archivists' Conclave on Floor 2001. The copy is the operative record. The original is retained on Floor 1187 in a locked press to which the key was lost in Cycle 883; the press has since been left unlocked, and the arrangement is considered an improvement.

An instrument may be designated a Quill of Concordance only by unanimous vote of the presiding Librarian Conclave, a requirement that has produced two Quills in four hundred cycles and, on eleven occasions, an instrument that everyone agreed was a Quill but which could not be called one. Such instruments are entered in the register as unanimity pending. The oldest has been pending since Cycle 522.