Concordance 128

Concordance 128 is a governance document of the Tower, promulgated in the winter of the year recorded in the registers of Stairwell 41-B as Y41889912, and held to be the earliest Concordance to have been written in a hand other than that of the scribe who signed it. It is chiefly consulted for its Annex 3, a schedule of inherited instruments, and for the circumstance of its composition, which remains the subject of an unresolved dispute between the Office of the Seal and the Scriptorium of the Lower Reaches.

Composition

Concordance 128 was drafted over eleven days on the landing of Stairwell 41-B, a circumstance unusual enough to be noted in the preamble itself. The responsible clerk, Amanor Vesh, then in the fourth year of a secondment from the Bureau of Inherited Instruments, had been dispatched to retrieve a box of superseded schedules from a store on floor 40,412 and did not return. Her account, appended to the document as Annex 9, states that the stairwell had acquired three additional landings between her descent and her attempt to climb back, and that she elected to remain on the landing and work until the stairwell "should see fit to finish rearranging itself."

The resulting text was completed in a single continuous draft with no recensions, a fact the Tracking Office cites as evidence that the document was never properly opened for amendment and is therefore, in a technical sense, still being written.

Content and Annex 3

The operative body of Concordance 128 consists of nine clauses, seven of which concern the inheritance of obligations between floors. Its principal innovation is the doctrine of carried obligation: a duty assigned to a floor does not lapse when the floor is renumbered, but travels with the number to whatever floor next receives it.

"An obligation does not adhere to the stone but to the number, and the number is a resident of the Tower and not of the floor."

— Concordance 128, clause 4

Clause 4 has been cited in every subsequent dispute over renumbered landings, including the long quarrel over whether the obligations of the former floor 6,118 were discharged or merely misplaced; the Concordance Reconciliation service maintains that they were misplaced and are recoverable, and has been recovering them since Y41990402.

Annex 3 sets out twenty-two inherited instruments in tabular form. It is the only surviving inventory of several documents since destroyed, among them the Schedule of Unopened Duties and the second recension of the Ledger of Lands Never Built. The Annex was copied without correction into the Twenty-Second Concordance and again, in abbreviated form, into The Seventh Concordance.

The discrepancy with Concordance 22

Scholars are divided on whether Concordance 128 was ever superseded. Concordance 22 opens with a blanket supersession of "all prior instruments of the same series", which would plainly include 128. However, Concordance 23 — itself entirely superseded by Concordance 22 — had already purported to supersede 128 in Y41890006, six months before 128 was drafted. The Third Concordance's principle that an instrument cannot be superseded before it exists was invoked by the Tracking Office in a ruling of Y41900317, which declined to resolve the question on the ground that "the order of events on a stairwell is not a matter on which this Office is competent to rule."

The Lost Concordance Faction has taken the contrary view, arguing that 128 was drafted in Y41889912 but dated retrospectively to Y41889889 to place it inside the coverage of Concordance 23, and that the entire document is therefore a fabrication of convenience. The Office of the Seal rejects this on palaeographic grounds: the ink of the date line is the same ink as the body, which, the Office observes, "would require a forger of quite unprecedented patience."

The question was further muddied by the Concordance Update Y54315445, which in reconciling The Fifth Concordance with The Seventh Concordance left Concordance 128 unmentioned in every schedule of affected instruments. Whether this silence preserves or abolishes the document has been debated at every session of the Assizes of the Middle Floors since.

The Vesh grievance

Amanor Vesh was never relieved from Stairwell 41-B and is recorded in the registers as seconded there in perpetuity, an arrangement the Bureau of Inherited Instruments describes as "administratively complete." Her repeated petitions for relief, filed at intervals of eleven years, are preserved as the Vesh Petitions and are the only known instance of a clerk petitioning against her own Concordance. The office established by her secondment carries a standing instruction, recorded at clause 7, that no one is to call down the stairwell after the fourth hour, on the ground that the call is not always answered by the stairwell.

Access

The original of Concordance 128 is held at floor 40,412 and may be consulted on application to the Scriptorium. Reading is permitted on the landing only, and visitors are asked to bring their own light.