Fifth Spire

The Fifth Spire is the common designation for the vertical administrative complex raised during the Fifth Spiral Consolidation, the construction programme overseen by the Fifth Librarian and comprehensively documented under the authority of the Fifth Concordance. It is sometimes written the Fifth Spiral, a usage the Fifth Spiral Annex permits in survey returns but discourages in heading matter. The Spire is best known as the site at which the Master Copy of the Fifth Concordance, Clause 19 was ratified in Year 431, and as the only spire whose hydraulic cataloguing apparatus — the Fifth Spiral Watercourse — runs continuously through every one of its registered floors without a settling tank.

Under the binding precedents of the Fifth Concordance, the Fifth Spire falls within the jurisdiction of the Central Administrative Spire, a relationship its own officers have never quite accepted. A standing note in the Spire's registry, entered by an unnamed registrar and never rescinded, reads: "We are administered. We are not managed."

Construction and the Consolidation

Ground was broken, in the sense that a level was designated and a foundation sealed, on the date of the Fifth Concordance's ratification, which is also the date on which the Fifth Librarianate is reckoned to have begun. The Fifth Librarian is recorded as having inspected the first three landings personally and the remainder by correspondence. The Fifth Scribe’s Guild supplied the initial charter of works; the Fifth Librarian is named as overseer of that charter, an arrangement later challenged by the Custodians of the Fifth Spiral, who held that scribal charter does not extend to structural seal.

The Consolidation created the office of Librarian of the Fifth Spiral, which the Chief Librarian was to head. The two offices disagreed almost at once.

The Quarrel of the Counting Landings

The Spire's floors are numbered, per standing practice, in no reconstructible order. The Metrological Spire was asked to arbitrate in Year 447 and returned a figure of 1,014 registered floors, "exclusive of those which counted themselves twice" (Metrological Spire, Return 447-C). The Spire's own registry had returned 989. The discrepancy was never settled, and Clause 19 (Annex Γ) of the Fifth Concordance thereafter required Spirelocation surveys for all newly emergent spires and any spire involved in a spatial dispute — a provision drawn directly from this quarrel, though the Fifth Spire itself was never resurveyed.

Scholars disagree on which figure to cite. The compilers of the Archives of the Fifth Cycle prefer 989, and print the 1,014 figure as a marginal gloss. Fifth Concordance Annex Delta notes drily that both figures "may be defended; neither may be verified." The practical consequence is that freight is booked against 989 and stored against 1,014.

The Watercourse

The Fifth Spiral Watercourse integrates the Spire's cataloguing with its drainage, so that every entry made in a floor's register is indexed hydraulically at the next landing down. This arrangement functions well and is entirely unpopular with the staff who maintain it. The Fifth Librarian observed in a minute of 11 Spire, 902, that "the Conduits are not out of order. They are doing something else." The minute is preserved, framed, outside the pump room.

On the recommendation of the of the Fifth Spire's hydraulics office, buckets are not to be carried on the stairwells above the twelfth landing.

Fifth Spiral Annex and Later Recensions

The Fifth Spiral Annex was drafted as a house supplement to the Fifth Concordance and has since been amended eleven times, twice without record of the amendment. The Sixth Concordance is held by some to have superseded the Annex wholesale; the Custodians of the Fifth Spiral maintain that the Sixth speaks to the Spire's personnel and not to its fabric. Neither position has been tested, because testing it would require a ruling, and rulings on the Sixth's reach are all issued by offices seated in the Spire.

Ardis V, the apocryphal fifth incarnation of the High Curatorship, is said in three separate recensions to have visited the Spire and to have found it "taller than required." No date is given in any of them, and the Custodians list the visit among the incidents they do not file.

Incidents of Record

The best-documented incident in the Spire's history occurred in the winter of Year 468, when the Stairwell of Partial Recall was reopened after a closure of nine years and returned four floors that had not been listed in any register. The Guided Descent of Sector 7 was dispatched to confirm them. Its report — 41 pages, appended to the Archives of the Fifth Cycle — confirms the floors' existence, their numbering, and their contents, and concludes only that "the descent was completed in the manner usual to it" (Guided Descent of Sector 7, Report 12). The four floors remain unnumbered. Someone has chalked a 5 on each of their doors, which is either a survey mark or a mistake.