Floor 712 (The Sceptic's Atrium)

Floor 712 (The Sceptic's Atrium) is an administrative floor of the eastern stack, entered from Stairwell 44 between the ninth and tenth landings, and is best known as the seat of Spiral Epsilon and of the Reliquary Alcove. The floor takes its name from the Atrium itself, a broad, unroofed well whose walls are lined with the recusant placards of Fifth and Ninth recensions. It is one of the few floors in the Tower whose name is itself disputed, a circumstance the floor's inhabitants regard as appropriate.

Layout and Access

The Atrium occupies the central third of the floor and is open to the shaft above for some ninety feet, so that it is lit, on the eleven days of the year when the upper apertures align, by direct light from Floor 711. The remainder of the floor is given over to the annex that joins Spiral Epsilon, the disused service spiral on the floor's northern edge, and to the vestibule of the Reliquary Alcove, which is kept locked between the hours of Compline and the second bell.

Visitors are asked to enter the Atrium from the south arch only. The north arch was sealed under Concordance 712-A following the draught of the winter of 4,208 and has not been reopened, though the seal is inspected annually and has twice been found intact.

The Sceptical Register

The floor's principal holding is the Sceptical Register, a bound series of ninety-one volumes in which the objections of visitors are recorded, numbered, and answered. The practice dates from the floor's foundation and is administered by the Archivist of Floor 712, an office presently held in commission by two clerks of the Scriveners Guild, who alternate by quarter.

An objection is entered in the Register in the objector's own words, where possible, and is then answered in the margin by the Archivist. Where the Archivist declines to answer, the objection is marked sustained and forwarded to the Atrium of Lapsed Mandates, which sits on the interstitial level between Floor 1173 and Floor 711 and which has never returned a sustained objection. The Register's forty-fourth volume contains the following entry, dated 3,996, and its margin:

"The floor is numbered 712 and yet lies between the ninth and tenth landings of Stairwell 44, which no one has reconciled."

— Sceptical Register, vol. 44, fol. 12

"Reconciliation is not the business of this floor."

— Archivist of Floor 712, marginal note, same folio

The Naming Dispute

The floor is called the Sceptic's Atrium in common use and the Atrium of the Sceptic in the Third Concordance, Annex 4, which governs the naming of atria and has been amended fourteen times. The distinction is not trivial. Under the Annex as amended, an atria named for a person requires a named founder, and no founder of Floor 712 has ever been produced. The Librarians have ruled twice on the question and contradicted themselves.

The first ruling, issued in 3,884 and cited as Ruling 61, held that the apostrophe was possessive and that the floor therefore required a founder, whose absence was to be treated as a defect in the record rather than a defect in the floor. The second, Ruling 204, issued eleven years later, held that the floor was named not for a person but for a disposition, and that the possessive was a scribal error preserved by long use. Ruling 204 has never been formally withdrawn. Both rulings remain in force, and the floor's stationery carries the possessive apostrophe while its door-plate does not.

Relation to Floor 711

The Atrium is subordinate in maintenance to the Calibration Atrium on Floor 711, which supplies its light and its water and which has, since 4,102, declined to supply either during the week of the Equinoctial inventory. The clerks of Floor 712 have protested this arrangement four times, most recently in a memorial of 4,390 addressed to the Central Sorting Atrium, which returned it unopened with a note that it had been misfiled. The memorial is preserved in the Reliquary Alcove and is the only item there that arrived by post.

Relations with Floor 412 are cordial but infrequent. Relations with the Calibrated Atrium on Floor 7,117 are neither, and the Archivist's standing instruction is that correspondence from Floor 7,117 be acknowledged and not read.

Holdings and Notes

Besides the Register, the floor holds the Almscup, a brass vessel of uncertain purpose, and the twelve placards of the recusant wall, of which nine are legible. The placards are not to be copied; the Scriveners Guild has ruled on this twice.

The floor is unheated. The Atrium's north arch is inspected on the first bell of each quarter, and the inspector is asked to sign the Register on leaving.