Floor 44 the Charnel Vaults

The designation Floor 44: The Charnel Vaults refers to a low, narrow shelf of reading rooms and transference cells situated immediately beneath the western stairhead of the forty-fourth floor, administered in common by the Scribes' Bureau and the Wardens of the Vaults under the general superintendence of the Charnel Index. The name is the source of a persistent and largely unproductive confusion: the Charnel Vaults of Floor 44 are not the Charnel Vault of Floor 712-C, nor are they a dependency of it, and the two holdings have been formally distinct since the Fourth Reconciliation of Vault Inventories of 2,109. What the two share is a subject matter — the reclassification of spent hours — and a name that has cost the Bureau a great deal of correspondence.

Situation and fabric

The Charnel Vaults occupy a passage of some ninety metres along the western wall, roofed at a uniform height of two and a half metres, a figure fixed by the Ordinance of Ceiling Heights and never revised. The vaults are lit under the arrangement known as the Chiaroscuro Register, by which the illumination at any reading station is set to the reflectance of the wall directly opposite it. Because the western wall was refaced in 1,988 with a pale plaster that has never been properly recorded, the eastern stations of the Vaults are considerably brighter than their fittings assume, and readers are advised to bring their own candle. The wall readings themselves are certified at Floor 912, as with the Argent Vaults, though no one has yet explained why a measurement taken forty floors away should bind the western passage.

Access is by the western stairhead only. The eastern door to the Vaults was sealed in the winter of 2,344 after a dispute with the Dormitory Vaults over the draught, and the frame has since been filled with shelving. The draught continues.

Holdings

The Vaults catalogue one class of thing: spent hours recovered from readers who have exhausted them in the course of study, together with the residual catalog entries those hours leave behind. A spent hour is not a period; it is a physical object, roughly the size of a small volume, and it degrades on the shelf in a manner described in the standard notice as "unhurried but total." The Charnel Vaults are the only low-shelf facility where spent hours are held at ambient rather than chilled temperature, a decision taken in 2,201 on grounds of cost and never revisited.

The holdings are inventoried in the Charnel Index under the sub-designations A through R. The Index's own compilers have twice noted that the sub-designation "C" attached to the Vaults' eastern cell does not agree with any sibling suffix recorded elsewhere in the Index, and that the letter appears to have been assigned by someone working from a list that has not survived. A marginal note of 2,290, in the hand of the clerk Ovin Thrast, reads: "C is not here. C is there. I have asked twice." No correction was ever made.

Operation and the hours

The Charnel Vaults operate without the night restriction that governs the Charnel Vault of Floor 712-C, whose operational window was fixed by Ninth Concordance, Annex 7, at 01:14 to 05:14 local floor-time. The Vaults of Floor 44 are open from the sixth hour to the nineteenth, and the discrepancy has become the standard example of a rule that does not travel. The Scribes' Bureau has argued, without success, that the western passage falls within the "adjacent transference precinct" named in Annex 7 and ought therefore to keep the same hours; Wardens of the Vaults replied in 2,412 that the Vaults are not adjacent to Floor 712-C, are not on the same floor, and have never been able to see it.

"The precinct is defined by the door, not by the stair. The stair goes everywhere."

— Wardens of the Vaults, letter to the Scribes' Bureau, 2,412

Transference of a spent hour into the Vaults is performed at a plain bench by the eastern window, unaccompanied, and takes the length of one recitation of the depositor's designation and the hour's entry. The bench is not to be used for writing. In 2,377 a reader named Albea Corr conducted an entire transfer while composing a note on the same surface, and the resulting hour was entered into the Index three times, once under each draft.

Disagreement as to the name

The twelfth Concordance holds that "charnel" is a designation of function, applicable to any vault in which exhausted hours are held, and that the name is therefore shared by right. The sixteenth, at Annex 2, holds the opposite: that "charnel" names a specific place beneath Floor 712 and that its broader use is a vulgarism, to be corrected in the catalogue but not in speech. The two have never been reconciled, and the practical consequence is that the Vaults of Floor 44 are filed under their full title in the reading lists and under the shorter name in the ledgers, and the two are periodically cross-checked by an office that has not been staffed since 2,301.

The Wardens of the Vaults have long maintained that the confusion has cost them their share of the transference fee, which the Sixth Concordance had assigned to the Vault-charnel "whatever its number." The Metrological Vaults were asked in 2,388 to rule on the matter, having custody of the Standard Unit of Procedural Delay, Specimen A, and declined on the ground that the question was not one of delay.

The winter of 2,344 and the draught

The Vaults' reputation for cold is older than the sealed door. The winter of 2,344 was the coldest recorded on the passage, and the locked door to the Dormitory Vaults froze at the jamb; a reader who has not been named in the record spent the night of the eleventh at the bench by the eastern window and was found in the morning, unharmed, with the transfer still pending. The Bureau's report of the following year attributed the incident to the draught and recommended that the passage be closed to readers in the cold months. The recommendation was not adopted. The bench is currently set back by one metre from the window and the sealed door is to be checked for draught in the second week of every February.

Retention and the null declaration

No spent hour has been removed from the Vaults since the general instruction of 2,349, and the passage now holds rather more than it can properly display. The Index was declared internally null in 3,447 and the effect on the Floor 44 holdings is discussed in the third recension of the Catalogue of the Charnel Vaults (unpublished), which argues that the declaration was a bookkeeping act and did not affect the objects themselves. The argument is accepted by the Wardens and rejected by the Scribes' Bureau. Answered enquiries are directed to the western stairhead; the eastern door is not to be knocked upon.