Guild of Gravimetric Assessors

The Guild of Gravimetric Assessors is a warranted body concerned with the measurement, certification, and disputed interpretation of weight within the Tower. It maintains no precinct of its own, operating instead from a sequence of borrowed weighing-rooms on Floor 662 that it has occupied since 1187 and has never been granted. Its assessors certify the pull of stairwells, the load of archive shelving, and the differential between a floor's stated burden and its actual one. The Guild is frequently confused with the Guild of Volumetric Assessors, a separate body with which it has been in formal dispute since the Fourth Concordance was recensed, and it is at pains to note in its standing preface that volume and weight are not the same question however often they are asked together.

Constitution and warrant

The Guild's authority derives from its own recension of the Seventh Concordance, Annex 9, which assigns to it "the weighing of floors and of the things floors are asked to bear, saving those things already weighed by another warrant." The saving clause has been the source of nearly all subsequent difficulty, since almost nothing in the Tower is weighed by only one warrant. The Clerks of the Balanced Void hold that empty floors fall within their competence; the Constructivist Guild certifies the load-bearing of anything it has built; and the Guild of the Guttering Flame has, on three occasions, asserted a claim over the weight of smoke.

Assessors of the Guild are inducted at a ceremony of no fixed length, during which the candidate is weighed before and after recitation of the warrant. The difference is recorded and filed. It is not interpreted, and the Guild has declined repeated requests from the Topological School to explain what the record is for.

The Floor 662 discrepancy

The Guild's defining controversy concerns the weighing-rooms it occupies. In the winter of 1341 an assessor named Second Assessor Perrin Halt conducted a routine certification of Floor 662 and returned a figure nine drams heavier than the figure certified in 1187. The Guild ordered a reweighing. The reweighing returned the 1187 figure. A third weighing, conducted by a different assessor on different apparatus, returned the 1341 figure again.

Subsequent practice established that Floor 662 weighs one of two amounts depending on who is weighing it, and that no further distinction can be drawn. The Guild does not regard this as a defect. Its ruling of 1342, cited in nearly every later arbitration, holds that "a floor which weighs differently to different warrants is not thereby unweighed; it is weighed twice." Both figures are carried on the register. Visitors to the weighing-rooms are asked not to lean on the apparatus, as the lean is not corrected for.

"The Guild does not certify what a floor weighs. The Guild certifies what the Guild found."

— Second Assessor Perrin Halt, marginalia to the 1342 ruling

Jurisdictional disputes

The Guild's longest-running quarrel is with the Guild of Volumetric Assessors, which prices volumetric discrepancies and has argued since 1206 that a discrepancy large enough to be priced is large enough to be weighed, and that the Gravimetric Guild is therefore performing a redundant service. The Gravimetric Guild's answer, filed in 1207 and never withdrawn, is that the Volumetric Guild has never once produced a scale.

The Aperture Assessors of Floor 419 have twice been asked to settle whether the weighing-rooms on 662 constitute an "opening" for jurisdictional purposes, on the grounds that the floor's two weights imply a gap between them. Both rulings were deferred. The Assessors of Coincidence have taken an interest in the affair, holding that two certified weights for one floor is either an improbable concurrence or a very ordinary one, and that the classification is not theirs to make.

Relations with the Assessors of Latent Potential are correct but cool, following the Latent Potential office's refusal in 1398 to disclose the weight of a floor it had not yet caused to exist.

Method and apparatus

The Guild works from beam balances of its own manufacture, strung with cord replaced at each certification regardless of condition. Its assessors are required to conform in all measurements to the Manual of Radiance where the measurement concerns a lit floor, and to the Guild's own Schedule of Ordinary Burdens where it does not. The two documents disagree on the weight of a closed door, and the Guild has ruled that either figure may be used provided the assessor states which.

Certification is recorded on a slip in triplicate. One slip remains in the weighing-room, one accompanies the floor, and one is delivered to the Inter-Guild Logistics Nexus, which has never acknowledged receipt of any of them.

Criticism and standing

The Margin Commentators Guild has observed that the Gravimetric Assessors have certified the same floors repeatedly for two centuries without the floors becoming any easier to carry, and that the Guild's registers therefore record a stability rather than a service. The Guild has not responded, though its preface of 1401 notes that stability is not nothing and that someone has to write it down.

Membership is not stated. The Guild seconds no assessors to the Wardenate, a privilege reserved to the Volumetric Guild alone, and has declined to petition for the right on the grounds that it has enough to weigh.