Concordance 7, Annex Δ

Concordance 7, Annex Δ is the fourth annex to the Seventh Concordance and is generally held to be the instrument by which the lateral status of certain annexes was first asserted in writing, rather than merely assumed in practice. It is a short document — eleven leaves in the authorised recension, nine in the earlier one still consulted by the Office of Lateral Registry — and it is unusual among the annexes of Concordance 7 in that it names no floor and no officer, concerning itself entirely with the question of what an annex is when it is placed beside another annex rather than beneath it. It should not be confused with the similarly designated Concordance VII, Annex δ, which is a different annex of a different concordance and which has been confused with it at least twice, with consequences described below.

Origin and the Winter Recension

Annex Δ was drafted in the winter following the collapse of the East Scriptorium gallery, when roughly four hundred documents were recovered from beneath fallen shelving and reassembled in an order that no one could later justify. The reassembly was carried out by Clerk Anneth Vowry, who spent nineteen days on the gallery floor and emerged with a stack of records she described in her covering note as "consecutive, in the main." Annex Δ was among them.

The Seventh Concordance had at that point been in force for some eleven years without an annex governing lateral placement, and the gap had produced a steady accumulation of disputes too small to convene the Concordance Bench and too persistent to ignore. Annex Δ was written in nine days and ratified in one. Its opening clause is famous for its economy:

"An annex contiguous with another annex is lateral to it. The contiguity shall be determined by the Registry, which shall not be asked to explain itself twice."

— Concordance 7, Annex Δ, clause 1

The Lateral Register and its consequences

The Registry's determinations were entered into the Lateral Register of Concordance 7, a bound volume that has since grown to forty-one volumes and a supplement. Entry into the Register confers what Annex Δ calls "side-standing" — a status distinct from annexation proper and from the provisional holding described in the Second Concordance, Annex D for Annex 19b. The distinction mattered enormously within a decade of the annex's ratification, because side-standing annexes were not subject to the quinquennial audit applied to annexed floors, and were therefore the only documents in the Tower that could lawfully be left unexamined for more than five years.

This provision was almost certainly unintentional. The drafting notes for clause 4 survive in the Vowry Papers, Box 2 and consist of the single line, in the clerk's hand, "audit question — leave to Registry." The Registry has never audited anything.

Function as a supersession index

Uniquely among the annexes of Concordance 7, Annex Δ carries a schedule of supersessions — a table listing the instruments it was understood to have replaced, in whole or in part. The schedule is not long, but it is heavily annotated:

• Clauses 1–2 of the superseded Standing Order of the Western Landings;
• The Provisional Placement Note of 6 Ember, Year 12;
• Portions of Concordance 4, later and more thoroughly displaced by the Fourteenth Concordance, Annex Omega;
• The whole of the Circular on Contiguity, withdrawn without explanation.

The schedule's authority was itself challenged in the matter of the Immovable Annex, where the Registry held that a structure which could not be moved from its floor could nevertheless stand laterally to another floor's holdings. The challenge was resolved by reference to Seventh Concordance, Annex Q, which adopted Annex Δ's schedule wholesale and thereby gave the Immovable Annex its lateral character without anyone having to descend to look at it.

The Vowry grievance

Clerk Vowry did not receive the annotation credit she expected for the schedule, which had been copied from her Box 2 draft nearly without alteration. She petitioned the Registry in Year 18 for a correction of the Register's front matter. The petition was denied on the grounds that Annex Δ's clause 1 forbade the Registry from being asked to explain itself twice, and that the Registry had already declined to explain itself once. Vowry's marginal note — "then I shall not ask the Registry; I shall ask the annex" — remains glued to the inside cover of Volume 9 and is considered by some readers to be the most quoted sentence in the whole of the lateral literature.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal dispute concerns the relation between Annex Δ and Seventh Concordance, Annex Q. The Office of Lateral Registry maintains that Annex Q superseded Annex Δ in all operational respects and that Δ survives only as a historical preface to Q's prediction tables. The Bench, in a note appended to the Third Concordance, Annex VII, has taken the contrary view, holding that Annex Δ's schedule of supersessions was adopted rather than replaced by Q, and that Q's tables therefore operate by reference to a document Q did not supersede.

The practical consequence is a standing ambiguity in the status of Concordance VII, Annex δ, which was entered in the Lateral Register on the strength of Annex Δ in Year 23 and has been removed and re-entered twice since without any change in its circumstances. Two entries in Volume 14 record the re-entry; a third, in pencil, records the re-entry that did not happen and cannot be accounted for. The Registry has declined to comment. Under clause 1, it is not obliged to.