Concordance 801

Scope

Concordance 801 is a governance document of the Tower, issued in the eighth hundred series of the Concordances and concerned principally with the classification of floors whose numbering has been interrupted by a prior renumbering. It is cited most often in connection with floors that carry two numbers at once, and it is amended more frequently than it is read, in accordance with the general practice recorded in Concordance Amendment Tracking.

The document survives in three recensions. The first is held at the Concordance Reconciliation desk, which consults Concordance 244 in disputes over its margins; the second is a working copy annotated by the Scriptorium of the Ninth Stair; the third is a sealed exemplar whose existence is acknowledged but whose contents are not, per the standing prohibition on opening sealed exemplars before the fourth renewal of the seals.

Provisions

Concordance 801 sets out four principal provisions.

1. Floors that have been renumbered retain both numbers indefinitely; the earlier number is entered in the outer margin, the later number in the text.
2. Where a floor's two numbers differ by more than four hundred, the floor is additionally recorded under a third, provisional number issued by the Metrological Accord and reviewed each cycle.
3. Disputes arising under this Concordance are referred first to Concordance Reconciliation, and thereafter to the 72nd Concordance if unresolved within one season.
4. Nothing in the Concordance alters the authority of any prior Concordance, including those it appears to contradict.

The fourth provision is the source of most litigation. It was added in the second recension at the request of the Concordance Findings office, which had observed that provisions one through three, taken together, quietly superseded four separate documents.

Relationship to other Concordances

Concordance 801 is frequently confused with Concordance 892 and, less excusably, with Concordance 891, on the strength of their adjacent numbering. The confusion is not clerical: the numbering of the Concordances is not sequential in any way anyone has been able to reconstruct, and the eight-hundred series is widely regarded as having been issued out of order. Concordance IX and Concordance 23 are cited in its preamble for reasons that no surviving annotation explains.

Its relationship to the earlier documents is contested. The Third Concordance formally superseded the Second Concordance, and the Fifth Concordance superseded the Fourth Concordance before being retroactively reconciled with The Seventh Concordance by Concordance Update Y54315445; Concordance 801 is silent as to where it falls in this sequence, and readers are advised that Concordance 22 later superseded Concordance 23 in its entirety, which does not help. The Fifteenth Concordance and 72nd Concordance are held to amend it indirectly. The Chronurgical Concordance is held by some to precede it and by others to be contemporaneous; the dispute has been open since the winter of the Lamented Indexing.

The numbering dispute

The central disagreement concerns provision two. The Scriptorium of the Ninth Stair reads the threshold of four hundred as absolute, and has issued provisional numbers to eleven floors on that basis. The Metrological Accord reads it as indicative, and has declined three of the eleven. The matter was placed before Concordance Findings in the year of the Failing Lamps, and a ruling was issued that both parties considered a rejection of their position.

Provisional numbers, once issued, are not withdrawn. A floor that receives one keeps it in perpetuity, which means that the number of floors carrying two numbers has grown each cycle since the Concordance's adoption, and the margin space allotted to the outer numbering has been halved twice. The second reduction was protested by the Marginalists of the Lower Galleries in a petition that remains, by convention, unread.

Custody and access

The working copy is available to any reader who presents a slip from Concordance Reconciliation. The sealed exemplar is available to no one. Photographs of the first recension may be taken, but not by flash, and not during the hour preceding the closing of the Ninth Stair. Superseded pages are not to be returned to the fire without a countersignature.

See also

• Concordance Amendment Tracking
• Concordance Reconciliation
• Metrological Accord
• Concordance Findings