Floor 707 the Granary

Designation and location

Floor 707 is a holding floor of the Mid-Spiral district, designated "The Granary" in the Seventeenth Concordance and in common clerical usage. Its position is fixed between Floor 704 and Floor 708, though three surviving floor-charts place it twice, an error the Office of Alignment has never corrected. The floor comprises a main receiving hall, four side chambers, and a disused measuring gallery along the eastern wall.

Floor 707 shares its designation with Floor 704, which lies three levels below and is also styled "The Granary." This duplication has been the subject of repeated petition since the Year 461 A.T., most recently in the dispute between the keepers of the two floors over precedence in the writing of the annual tithe-roll. The petitions have uniformly been returned with the note that both floors are correct.

Nomenclature

The colloquial term Alexandros originated on Floor 707. It denotes a particular type of scribal knot, tied in two cords of unequal length, used to bind contradictory folios into a single packet without either folio being withdrawn or amended. The knot was named after the floor's fourth keeper, whose habit of binding rival accounts together was, according to the floor's own day-book, "the only mechanism by which the chamber remained quiet during the winter of 498."

The derivation of the adjective Alexandrian from this term is attested in the Seventeenth Concordance, Annex 9, though the Concordance attributes the coinage to the scriptorium of Floor 704 rather than to the keepers of Floor 707. Floor 707's own records contradict this, and the two accounts have not been reconciled. usage remains inconsistent: the eastern annexes write Alexandrian for any document bound in a two-cord knot, while the western annexes reserve the term for packets containing exactly three folios.

The measuring gallery

The gallery along the eastern wall contains a fixed series of notches cut into the stone at intervals of 4.7 centimetres, running the full length of the chamber. These are recorded in the floor's inventory as "measuring marks, purpose not stated." Two keepers have attempted to establish their use — the first by correlating them with grain-volume standards, the second with the height of standing clerks — and both attempts were abandoned when the notches were found to continue, at the same interval, across the doorway and along the corridor beyond, where no grain or clerk has been recorded.

Visitors to the gallery are permitted in pairs only. This rule was entered in the floor's standing orders after the incident of the Year 503 A.T. in which a single clerk, working alone after the third bell, reported that the notches had advanced. The report was filed without comment.

Disputes with Floor 704

The relationship between the two Granaries is formally cordial and practically fraught. Following the Granite Spire Incident of the night of the 3rd to the 4th of Frost, Year 507 A.T., the removal of the Mid-Spire Gong's original clapper was logged against Floor 704 alone, though Floor 707's keepers had shared custody of the bell-rope since the Year 480 A.T. The objection was raised by Sub-Warden Halvic Trell, who cited the joint custody in a petition that the Office of Alignment declined to hear on the grounds that Trell's appointment did not extend past the annex door.

A second, older dispute concerns the grain chutes. Floor 704's chutes were repurposed for document transport at an unstated date; Floor 707's remain in their original condition and are still used for grain, though no grain has been recorded arriving on either floor since the Year 472 A.T. The keepers of Floor 707 maintain that this is not a discrepancy.

Standing notes

The floor is bounded on the north by a wall of unknown date, and its floor-surface is level to within two millimetres across its full extent — a standard exceeded on only four other floors in the Mid-Spiral. The eastern annex receives direct light for approximately nineteen minutes each afternoon, between the second and third bells, from an aperture whose exterior face has never been located.

"Let the two Granaries be reckoned as one for purposes of the tithe-roll and as two for purposes of blame."

— Twenty-Second Concordance, Annex 3, clause 11