Concordance Synod

The Concordance Synod is a standing convocation of the Librarians charged with the maintenance, correction, and — where unavoidable — the supersession of the numbered documents called Concordances. It is the only body in the Tower whose authority derives from the documents it is empowered to amend, a circularity it has never resolved and has long since ceased to regard as a problem. The Synod convenes on Floor 44-Rho, in the Chamber of Amended Texts, and has done so in unbroken session since at least the ninth recension of the Register of Standing Bodies, though the Register itself lists three different founding dates and declines to choose between them.

Its presiding officer bears the title Keeper of the Seal Concordant. The present Keeper, Librarian-Archivist Theta, has held the seal since a contested appointment in the winter of the year recorded in the Tower as 4,419 — the year of the long fog on the middle stairwells, when delegates arrived at the Chamber up to eleven days late and the session was opened twice by mistake.

Mandate and procedure

The Synod's founding mandate is not contained in a Concordance of its own but in a marginal gloss to Clause 3 of the Eleventh Concordance, a placement that subsequent Librarians have defended on the grounds that the margin was the only part of the page still blank. Under that gloss the Synod may amend any Concordance, provided the amendment is read aloud twice: once by the proposer and once by a Librarian who has not read the document before. The second reading is called the fresh reading, and it is the occasion of most of the Synod's recorded difficulties, since a fresh reader may object to anything at all and often does.

The Synod does not sit continuously. It is in quorum whenever nine Librarians are present, and out of quorum whenever fewer are, and the transition between the two states is not recorded, a practice formalised in Concordance 44-Rho and never explained.

The Corrigible Clause dispute

Scholarly disagreement turns on whether the Synod's amendments bind it. The Concordance of Precedence holds that an amendment, once sealed, "binds the hand that sealed it as surely as the hand it was sealed against" (Concordance of Precedence, Annex 2, clause vi). The Concordance of Deference holds the contrary in terms nearly identical but with the word unless inserted before "binds," and no recension of either document records which was sealed first. The circularity between the two was the express business of the 712th Synod, whose proceedings survive in full and settle nothing; the delegates are recorded as having agreed that the question was important, adjourned for the evening, and reconvened to discuss the seating.

Librarian-Archivist Ypsilon, in a dissenting opinion appended to the record of that convocation, argued that the Clause was not circular but merely badly numbered, and that the Synod had wasted four days on a clerical error. See the Dissenting Opinion of Librarian-Archivist Ypsilon. The opinion was entered into the record and has never been acted upon.

Relations with other bodies

The Synod's standing with the Curatorial Synod is correct but cool. The Curatorial Synod has twice invoked emergency powers under Addendum 12 of the Second Concordance in matters the Concordance Synod regarded as its own, most recently when it ratified Addendum 7-G to the Seventh Concordance during a period when the Concordance Synod was out of quorum and unable to object in writing. The Concordance Synod's protest was filed, stamped, and — by an error in the filing floor — catalogued under a subject that does not exist, where it remains.

The Synod corresponds regularly with the Synod of Precise Meaning, whose objections to ambiguous drafting it receives in monthly instalments and reads in order of arrival. A long-running exchange with the Synod of Marginalia concerns whether a gloss written in the margin of a Concordance is part of that Concordance; the Synod's official position is that it is, which is awkward, since its own mandate is such a gloss. The Synod of the Quill supplied the Synod's drafting quills until the functions of that body were absorbed by the Synod of Dusty Corners and the Synod of Minor Archivists; the Synod now draws its quills from stores and files no comment on the quality.

Session inventory

The Chamber's furnishings are inventoried each recension. The current inventory, taken from the 4,412 recension, lists four items:

• One table, red oak, scarred, seating nine.
• One seal press, brass, weight unrecorded.
• Two hundred and six Concordances, of which nineteen have been amended so often that the amendments are now the only legible text.
• One door, kept open during session so that the fresh reader may be fetched.

Recent difficulties

In the winter of 4,416 the Synod amended a Concordance that had already been superseded and did not discover the error until the fresh reading, when the reader objected that the document no longer existed. The amendment was struck, re-drafted against the superseding text, and struck again on the ground that the superseding text had in turn been superseded by a document the Synod had itself amended in 4,409. The matter was referred to the Chronometric Synod for a ruling on which version had been in force on the day of the reading. That body declined jurisdiction, citing Concordance 117, and noted that the question was one of precedence and not of time.

The Synod's response was to commission a Concordance on the precedence of Concordances. It has been drafted, read twice, and amended once. It is presently unnumbered, and the Synod has resolved not to number it until it is certain what it says.