Curatorial Spire

The Curatorial Spire is the collective designation for the eleven vertical structures raised within the Tower to house the offices, scriptoria, and dispute chambers of the Curatorial Guild. The Spires are not contiguous; they are distributed across floors 4 through 3,880, and no two are joined by a single uninterrupted stair. Access between any two Spires is by way of a routing floor, a fact whose administrative consequences are discussed under Curatorial Spire Routing and have occupied the Curatorial Bench for the better part of a century. The Spires are numbered I through XI, though XI has been sealed since 1147 and is counted only for purposes of quorum.

Composition and numbering

Each Spire is assigned a curatorial subject and a floor ceiling. The first four — I, II, III, and IV — are the great working Spires and between them house the bulk of the Guild's daily registry. Spire VII, the 7th Curatorial Spire, is the best documented in the archive owing to the long tenure there of K. Thorne, whose Thorne Progression logarithmic scale was calibrated against the spiral pitch of that structure and has since been applied, with acknowledged distortion, to the rest.

The Ninth Spire was raised to accommodate the Curators of the Loom and the Tenth to accommodate the Curators of the Still; disputes between these two bodies, which are frequent matters of jurisdiction rather than doctrine, are cleared at the High Curators Spire in accordance with the standing arrangement described in Concordance XIX. The Curatorial Council maintains offices on the Seventh Spiral Administrative Spire, a designation that is frequently confused with the 7th Curatorial Spire proper, and the confusion is not helped by their sharing a landing.

Architectural particulars

The Spires are unglazed save at the aperture rings, which occur at intervals of 61 floors and are marked in Roman numerals on the interior face. Lighting is by the Waxwell Atrium system, maintained under Curatorial Mandate 771-A by the Librarians of the Lower Spire, whose jurisdiction over the tap-wicks terminates at the aperture ring and resumes beneath it. The pitch of a Spire's internal spiral is fixed at construction and is not recorded in any Concordance; the survey of 1301, undertaken by the Metrological Spire at the Council's request, established the pitch of nine of the eleven Spires but lost its instruments on Spire X in the fifth winter month and did not return.

The interior of the Seventh Spire carries a red chalk line at waist height along the whole of its ascent. It marks the boundary between the Curatorial and Administrative faces of the structure and was laid by order of Senior Archivist Kael in 1249 after an amendment dispute in which two clerks documented the same floor as belonging to opposite Spires for the whole of an autumn. The line has since been copied imperfectly onto Spires III and IV, where it is not authoritative.

The dispute with the Weeping Gallery

Jurisdiction over the Weeping Spire — a narrow structure adjoining the southern face of Spire VI, and not counted among the eleven — has been contested since 1268, when the Weeping Gallery raised an objection to its inclusion in the Guild's fiscal return, citing precedent and morphological similarities to documented events. The Gallery's position, stated in its submission of the eleventh month, was that a Spire that weeps is not a Spire.

"A structure that admits water has not been raised for curatorial purposes, whatever purposes it may have been raised for; and it may not, on that account, be enumerated as though it had."

— The Weeping Gallery, Submission to the Curatorial Bench, 1268

The Bench declined to rule and referred the matter to the Curatorial Board, which has carried it on its agenda continuously since. The practical effect is that the Weeping Spire is maintained, lit, and swept, but appears in no return, and the sweepers are paid from a separate account whose number is not published.

Scholarly disagreement

There is no settled account of how many Spires exist. The Curatorial Practicemaster Log of Amendments records eleven in its third recension and twelve in its fourth, the discrepancy turning on whether the stair tower between Spires V and VI, which carries no office but encloses a landing used by the Bureau of Curatorial Acquisitions for the storage of returned seals, is to be counted. Concordance XLI and Concordance XLII disagree on the point directly: the former, at clause 6, enumerates "the eleven Spires of the Guild, with the landing betwixt the fifth and sixth"; the latter, at clause 9, retains the landing in a separate schedule and describes it as "no Spire but a place where seals are put." Both remain in force, and the Curatorial Assembly has twice declined to amend either, on the stated ground that a question of enumeration is best left to practice.

Practice, meanwhile, records eleven. The Curatorial Review of 1402 notes that the Guild's annual return has enumerated eleven for ninety-one consecutive years and describes the disagreement as "settled in the ledger, if nowhere else."

Access and customary observance

Traversal between Spires is by routing floor, and a clerk may cross no more than three Spires in a day without lodging a form. The rule dates to 1187 and is not enforced. Visitors — a category that includes clerks of other Spires, Curators of the Loom and Still, and anyone carrying a seal not issued at the destination — are required to ring the lower bell twice and the upper once, and to leave their chalk at the door. Chalk is not returned.

The Spires are closed to all parties on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, on which day the aperture rings are restruck and no ascent may begin after the second bell.