Custodians

The Custodians are the Tower's oldest continuous class of office-holders, predating the Librarians themselves by an interval no recension agrees on but which the Concordance of First Seals fixes at one hundred and eleven floors of construction. The term denotes not a single body but a family of specialized orders, each entrusted with the upkeep, arbitration, or sealing of a particular class of thing: stairs, apertures, fluids, static geometry, silence, and grief. A Custodian is not a Librarian and does not catalogue; the Custodians keep what the catalogues describe, and the distinction is enforced by the Ordinance of Separated Hands, which forbids any individual from holding both a Custodial seal and a cataloguing pen in the same hand.

Origins and the First Seals

The office is traditionally dated to the sealing of the Lower Vestibule in the winter of the year recorded as 4 A.S. (After Sealing). The Concordance of First Seals, Annex 2, states that "the first Custodian was appointed to keep a door that had begun to open by itself, and the appointment was never revoked" — a formulation that later bodies have cited to argue that Custodial authority is perpetual and cannot lapse for want of a holder. The Custodians of Stairs invoke this clause whenever a stairwell stands vacant and they wish to claim it, and they invoke it successfully with some regularity.

Principal bodies

The Custodial orders are numerous, but the following are recognized by the Register of Sealed Offices as holding primary seals:

• Custodians of Stairs — stairwell upkeep and the confirmation of Wardens.
• Custodians of the Aperture — portal parameters, Aperture Storms, and the oversight of Aperture Omega.
• Custodians of Fluids Amp Flux — the movement of liquids and the sealing of their leaks.
• Custodians of Static Geometry — a sub-cadre of the Custodians of the Silent Stacks, concerned with shapes that will not be moved.
• Custodians of Closure — the classification of grief-states as Unfinished.
• Custodians of the Margin — encroachment disputes, including those with the Stairs and the Aperture.
• Custodians of Pure Fact — the validation of statements before their Final Inscription.

The list is not exhaustive. The Custodians of the Unsaid hold a seal the Register declines to describe, and the Quiet Bureau Custodians are listed under a heading the Register has since pasted over.

The Margin question

Much of the Custodial year is consumed by jurisdictional dispute. The Custodians of the Margin were established in the wake of the Long Encroachment to arbitrate where one body's charge ends and another's begins, and they have arbitrated continuously since, largely between the Custodians of Stairs and the Custodians of the Aperture, whose boundaries meet at every landing with a window. The Custodians of the Aperture are separately rivals of the Custodians of the Gilded Silence, a dispute over the strip of wall between a portal frame and its hanging, which has produced forty-one Margin rulings and no settlement.

The scholarly difficulty is that the Fourth Concordance assigns encroachment to the Margin, while the Sixth Concordance, Annex 9, assigns it to the Custodians of Measurement, on the reasoning that an encroachment is a measured quantity and not a boundary at all. Both have been cited in the same session of the Assizes of the Ninth Landing. The Margin's standing reply, recorded by the Clerk Ovan Rees in his Observations on the Long Encroachment, is that "a thing measured is not thereby owned" — a sentence the Measurement order has never answered and has never stopped quoting in its own favor.

Appointment and the seal

Custodians are appointed by sealed instrument rather than by vote. The instrument names the office, the floor, and the class of thing to be kept, and it is held to be invalid if any of the three is left blank. The Custodians of Stairs confirm the appointment of each Warden, a duty they have exercised without interruption since 12 A.S. and have twice exercised on the same Warden, to their evident satisfaction. A Custodian may hold only one seal at a time, though a sealed office may stand vacant for years, as the Custodians of the Vertical did between the death of Librarian Esh and the appointment of her successor — an interregnum during which the Vertical was, by the Register's own note, "kept by nobody and descended normally."

Seals are not carried on the person. They are kept in the office to which they belong and are applied by the holder's own hand at the time of use; the Ordinance of Separated Hands adds that the seal is not to be taken to the refectory. Custodians on floors above the fortieth are permitted a second seal for the duration of a descent.

Relations with the Librarians

The Custodians and the Librarians are described in the Third Concordance, Article III, as "two hands of one body," a phrase the Custodians of Measurement drafted and the Librarians have never formally accepted. In practice the two orders overlap constantly: the Custodians of Pure Fact validate the statements that Librarians then inscribe, and the Custodians of Coherence and Custodians of Tangibility are consulted on any holding whose existence is in doubt. The Custodians of the Central Spire have not been consulted on anything since the Recess of the Spire and have not complained, which the Margin has noted.

"The Custodian keeps; the Librarian says. Neither is permitted to envy the other's work, and the envy is recorded annually in the ledger."

— Concordance of First Seals, Annex 6

The annual ledger of envy is held in the Lower Vestibule and is closed to inspection, though its covers are counted each year and the count is published.