Guild of Summoners

The Guild of Summoners is a chartered body of the Fourth Spiral concerned with the formal calling-forth of persons, documents, and appointments that are already somewhere in the Tower but are not, at the moment of summoning, in the room. It is among the oldest guilds with a continuous seal, though its seal has been recut eleven times, and it is the only guild whose members are required to state their own surnames aloud before answering to them. The Guild does not create. This distinction is set out at length in the Charter of the Summoners, Article 1, and has been litigated more or less continuously since the seventh recension.

Mandate and method

A summoning is a request, made in the prescribed cadence, that a named thing present a summons-answer within a stated interval. The Guild maintains that this is a matter of logistics rather than of substance, and has successfully argued the point before the Concordance of Sealed Disputes on four occasions. Summoners do not transport anyone; the walking is done by the summoned party. They do not retrieve documents; the documents are fetched by the Guild of Inter-Floor Messengers, for whom the Summoners' Guild sets the response windows under a standing arrangement renewed each Ascension.

Practical work is coordinated through the Inter-Guild Logistical Network Guild, which assigns each summoning a route and a maximum descent of nine floors per day. A summoner who exceeds this is required to file a Descent Variance with the Guild of Groundskeepers, who maintain the stairwell registers.

The problem of the answer

Summoning presumes that the summoned party can hear the summons, and the Guild has never conclusively established that this is so. The doctrine of answerable presence holds that a thing correctly named and correctly cadded will answer, and that failure to answer is evidence that the name or the cadence was wrong, not that the thing was elsewhere. This is convenient and has never been disproved. The Reflector Guild has twice challenged it, observing that a doctrine which cannot fail is not a finding. The Summoners replied, in a memorandum of 14 Ember, that a finding which can fail is not a summoning.

"Where a summons is unanswered, the fault lies in the summons. A faultless summons is, by definition, answered. It is not open to us to suppose a faultless summons and an absent party, for the supposition contradicts the first term."

— Librarian Ordinal Vestrius, On Answerable Presence, folio 44r

Critics note that this reasoning also justifies the practice of summoning the same person up to forty times in a single afternoon, which the Guild's cadence tables permit and which the Scribes' Guild of the Middle Floors has petitioned against on grounds of noise.

Origins and the Long Recall

The Guild dates its founding to the winter of the year now numbered 7 of the Fourth Spiral, when, according to its annals, a clerk named Summoner Halven Marrow was sent to fetch a colleague from a reading room on floor 2,113 and returned alone after eleven days. The reading room had no colleague in it. Marrow's report, preserved in the Guild's archive, argues at length that the colleague had been in the room and had failed to be present, and that the distinction was worth formalising. The Guild has honoured the report ever since and reads a portion of it aloud at each admission.

The event known as the Long Recall occurred three centuries later, when the Guild attempted a coordinated summons of every living Summoner, on the reasoning that the Guild was entitled to know its own membership. Of the two hundred and six summonses issued, thirty-one were answered on the day, forty were answered after the Guild had disbanded for the season, and one hundred and thirty-five were pursued to the following spring, at which point the effort was abandoned and the roll declared complete by a Concordance amendment later found to apply only to the Guild of Oneirology. The Guild's current membership is therefore stated as a range.

Dispute with the Constructivist Guild

The sharpest disagreement in the Guild's history concerns whether a summoning may precede the existence of the thing summoned. The Constructivist Guild holds that nothing can be called which has not been made, and that the Summoners' practice of summoning vacant offices to their own filling is an absurdity dressed in cadence. The Summoners hold that an office exists precisely in order to be filled, and that it is therefore present, in the relevant sense, before its holder is.

The matter was referred to the Theoretical Jurisprudence Guild, which returned it unresolved but with a new index. The Margin Commentators Guild has noted in three successive recensions that the Summoners' position cannot be told apart from saying that the chair summons the sitter, and that this is either profound or a clerical error, and that the Commentators have not decided which.

Records, prohibitions, and maintenance

Every summoning is entered in the Guild's Roll of Calls, kept on floor 1,806 in a chamber that cannot be entered while a summoning is in progress anywhere in the Tower, a condition the Guild describes as "usually resolving by the second bell."

Two standing prohibitions are repeated on the chamber door:

• No summons may be issued to a party already in the room, save to confirm arrival.
• No summoner may answer a summons issued by themselves.

A third prohibition, concerning names of more than four syllables, was withdrawn in 12 Ember following a complaint from the Glasswrights' Guild, whose operative designations are registered as GL-Beta-7 and cannot be shortened without voiding their invoices. The Guild apologised in writing and amended its cadence tables to accommodate the designations in two breaths. The Guild of Formal Cartographers has since requested the same courtesy for spiral coordinates, and the request remains under consideration, as spiral coordinates are not, in the Guild's view, persons.