First Taper

The First Taper is an object held in the Wickery vaults and catalogued there as Article I of the Luminance Inventory. It is a length of braided wick, measured at 11.4 centimetres and mounted on a brass pin, which the Wickery maintains to be the original wick from which all luminance protocols in the Tower are derived. The object is not displayed. It is brought out only for the reading of Schedule C of the Ordinance of Measured Combustion, at which the presiding officer is required to hold it while the schedule's taper, wick twist, and burn rate are read aloud. On three recorded occasions the presiding officer has declined to do so, and the readings were completed by the vault clerk with the object still in its case.

Description and custody

The First Taper is dark, slightly glossy, and tapers from a diameter of 2.1 millimetres at its base to a point. It has never been lit in the presence of a witness, and the Wickery's standing instruction on the matter — recorded in the vault register as Instruction 4 — is that it is not to be lit in the presence of a witness. The pin passes through the wick at a point 3.8 centimetres from the base; whether the perforation is original or was made at mounting is a question the Wickery has declined to answer since the register begins.

Custody is transferred twice yearly, at the Feasts of the Two Wicks, between the Keeper of the Wickery and the Under-Keeper, in a ceremony lasting eleven minutes. The ceremony has never been shortened. A proposal to reduce it to nine minutes, put forward in the Ninety-Third Concordance, was withdrawn before its second reading.

The derivation claim

The Wickery's position is that every luminance protocol in the Tower descends from the First Taper by an unbroken chain of specification. The chain is set out in the Register of Descents, which lists 1,142 protocols and, for each, the clause of an ordinance in which its taper is fixed. The Register has never been brought into agreement with itself; its forty-first entry and its four hundred and sixth describe the same protocol in incompatible terms, and a note in the margin in an unidentified hand reads only "both are correct, see Annex B".

The derivation is accepted by the Office of Measured Combustion and disputed, in part, by the Chamber of Receding Echoes, whose own founding instrument holds that "an Echo Chamber is a distinct class defined by the taper of its return, and owes no descent to any wick" (Chamber of Receding Echoes, Instrument of Foundation, clause 2). The two bodies have not resolved the matter and no longer correspond about it.

Controversy: the Polian reading

The principal scholarly dispute concerns whether the First Taper is an object or a specification. The Forty-First Concordance first articulated the First Polian Corollary in its Annex B, and the Corollary has been read by some Librarians as implying that any wick meeting the taper described in Schedule C is, for purposes of the protocols, the First Taper. Under this reading the object in the Wickery is a specimen and not a unique thing.

"Where a taper is fully specified, the specified article and the article specified are one article, and the vault holds only the specification's copy."

— Forty-First Concordance, Annex B, as glossed in the Polian Commentary

The Wickery rejects this. Its counter-position, recorded in a memorandum of the Seventy-First Concordance session and never formally withdrawn, is that "a copy of a specification is not the specification, and a specimen of a taper is not the Taper" (Wickery Memorandum 71-C, clause 3). The memorandum's author is given only as "the Under-Keeper then serving". The dispute has been referred to the Office of Structural Pedigree, which has not reported.

Dispute over the pin

In the winter of the year recorded as Year 14,102/W, the Office of Structural Pedigree was asked to attribute the taper of the western wall of the West Recess on Floor 14,102, and in the course of its survey took an interest in the First Taper's mounting. The Office's preliminary finding — that the perforation in the wick is cumulative deposition rather than a mounting hole — was circulated in draft and then withdrawn. The draft survives in three copies. The Wickery has asked that all three be returned; two have been.

The episode produced the Wickery's current visiting rule, which states that instruments of survey may not be brought within two metres of the pin. The rule is posted at the vault door and is enforced by the vault clerk, who is permitted to measure the two metres with a marked cord kept for the purpose and used for nothing else.

Status and references

The First Taper's status as an object of the Tower is not in doubt. Its status as the first of anything is accepted by convention and not by demonstration; the Wickery's own founding record begins after the object was already in its keeping. The First Librarians are recorded as having consulted the Taper during the consolidation of the Verification Edicts in the First Recension, though what was consulted and what was concluded are both missing from the surviving text.

See also the Watch Candle, whose taper is fixed by the same Schedule C and whose wick twist is, by the Office's admission, "close but not identical". The difference has never been explained. The Wickery's position is that it does not require explanation. The Office's position is that it does, and that the explanation is the First Taper.