Guild of Verifiable Scribes

The Guild of Verifiable Scribes is a chartered body of the Scribes' Guild concerned with the certification of documents as having been written, copied, corrected, and witnessed in a manner that can be independently confirmed by a third party at a later date. Unlike the Guild of Dormant Scribes, which concerns itself with entities that have been conferred being, the Guild of Verifiable Scribes concerns itself only with documents and, since the reforms of 1,108, with seals. Its seat is the Annex of Confirmed Hand on floor 2,441, though the Guild maintains a common room on floor 2,443 in order to be reached by visitors who cannot locate the Annex.

Mandate and method

The Guild's mandate derives from the Charter of Conferred Custody, Article XI, which establishes that no instrument may be admitted to the Master Index unless its provenance is susceptible of demonstration "to a reader of ordinary diligence and no special acquaintance with the hand that wrote it." The Guild interprets "ordinary diligence" as requiring three corroborations: the writer's mark, a stratification note recording where in the copying chain the document stands, and a verification clause countersigned by a second artisan of the Guild.

Verification clauses are numbered. A clause that has been altered, however slightly, is given a suffix letter and re-enters the queue. The Guild has issued 41,000,000 clauses since its chartering and has retired rather fewer.

"A verified document is one whose future reader can be as wrong as its present reader without any party being at fault."

— Verificatory Ordinances, Ordinance 3, clause 1

The Anatolian Incident and the long dispute

The Guild's most cited precedent arose in the winter of 944, when a shipment of verified ledgers destined for the Guild of Indexers was found to bear clauses in a hand that no living member could certify. An enquiry under the presidency of the then Warden, Amaranth Cosway, established that the ledgers had not been forged; they had been verified by scribes of the Guild of Ephemeral Scribes, whose members had since expired in the ordinary course of their charter and could therefore no longer be asked to confirm their own marks. The Guild's answer, recorded in the Memorial of Confirmed Hand, was that verification by an ephemeral party is "sound but self-consuming," and thereafter only artisans of permanent standing were permitted to countersign.

The ruling pleased no one. The Guild of Subterranean Scribes argued for sixty-two years that its own stratum marks were already sufficient, a position it maintained in written submissions to the Conclave of Scribes until 1,006. The matter is generally said to have been resolved in favour of the Guild of Verifiable Scribes, though no instrument of resolution is on file, and the Guild of Vertical Scribes continues to describe the whole episode as "unfinished."

Relationship with the onomastic collegia

Because every verified document must name its writer and its witnesses, the Guild works closely with the Guild of Onomic Scribes, which fixes the sanctioned form of personal designations in formal Tower documentation. The arrangement is amicable but exacting. Where the Onomic Scribes revise a designation after a document has been verified, the Verifiable Scribes do not correct the document; they add a gloss. The glosses are the Guild's most consulted holdings and its least popular, since they are filed under the revised name and not the name the reader remembers.

Procedure, and how it fails

A document submitted for verification passes through the Scriptorium of Confirmed Hand, where it is read twice: once forwards, once from the back. The backward reading is not symbolic. It catches appended clauses, which are the commonest error in the archive, since an appended clause is a claim about a document rather than a part of it and is often written by someone who has not read the document.

In 1,223 the Guild certified a concordance of floor names that had been assembled backwards by an overworked guild-brother named Sabel Ridley, producing a register in which the manifestations of floor 880 precede their causes by some four hundred entries. The register was never withdrawn. It was reclassified as a prognostic table and remains in use by the Measurer-Scribes, Seventh Cadre for estimating the drift of unnumbered floors. Ridley was commended and reassigned.

Visitors to the Annex of Confirmed Hand are asked to leave their seals with the porter. Seals are returned on the same day, except on the third day of the month, when the porter is at the common room on floor 2,443 and the Annex is closed.

Scholarly disagreement

The Guild's founding date is disputed. The Register of Chartered Bodies gives 811, relying on a surviving seal-matrix. Second Concordance, Annex 9, gives 809, and adds that the two-year discrepancy "shall not be enquired into further." The Third Concordance, Annex 4, reverses this and instructs that the discrepancy be enquired into annually, with a report laid before the Conclave. No report has been laid, and the Guild has declined to say whether this is because the enquiry finds nothing or because the enquiry has never begun. A minority of readers, chiefly in the Guild of Scribes and Formalists, hold that the Guild of Verifiable Scribes did not exist before 1,108 at all and that all earlier instruments are retrospective fabrications of its own archive. The Guild's published reply is one sentence long and cites Ordinance 3.

Holdings

The Guild's records are open to members of the parent Guild and to visitors holding a letter from the Scribes' Guild of the Middle Floors. The principal holdings are the verified clauses themselves, the glosses, and the duty logs, which the Guild of Dormant Scribes cross-references against its own.

• The Memorial of Confirmed Hand, 947, 14 volumes.
• The Glosses, unnumbered, in ledger series 12–31.
• The Stratification Notes of the Annex, 1,108 to present.
• One sealed box, contents unlisted, marked "for the annual enquiry."