House of Veld

The House of Veld is a standing commission of the Librarians charged with the valuation of objects whose worth has been disputed, forfeited, or found to be non-transferable. It is not a family, despite the form of its name, and has admitted no hereditary members since the closing of the Veld register in 3,088. The House sits in the eastern gallery of the Curatorial Spire, in chambers hung with struck seals and occupied by nine Assessors and a permanent secretary, an office presently held by Clerk Marrow Vell of the fourth intake.

The House is best known for the instrument it perfected, the conditional valuation: an object may be assigned a price that takes effect only upon the occurrence of a stated event, and lapses if the event does not occur. The practice has been copied by nearly every annex in the upper floors and has never been successfully abolished.

Origin and the First Valuation

The House was constituted under Concordance 41, which established that "no thing shall be valued twice in the same quarter, nor by two offices in the same hour" (Concordance 41, Clause 7). The clause was intended to end a long dispute between the Central Cartulary and the Annex of Weights and Appetites over the appraisal of a consignment of unlabelled reliquaries. It did not end the dispute. It created a third office to adjudicate it, which is the outcome the Concordance had been drafted to avoid.

The first recorded valuation, entered in the House's opening ledger for the winter of 2,914, concerned a sealed cabinet of eleven drawers. The House valued the cabinet at four hundred marks and the drawers at nothing, on the grounds that they had never been opened and could not, therefore, be said to contain anything. When the cabinet was later opened and found full, the valuation was not revised; the House ruled that the contents had been acquired after the valuation and were the property of whoever opened it. That ruling is still cited, chiefly by people who have just opened something.

Procedure of Conditional Valuation

An assessment proceeds in three readings. At the first, the Assessor states the object's condition without naming a sum. At the second, a sum is named but not recorded. At the third, the sum is recorded and the condition attached. Should any Assessor object between the second and third readings, the valuation is void and the object is returned to its holder with a note explaining that it has been "valued unsuccessfully."

Objection is rare. The House's reputation rests on the reliability of its conditions, which are drawn from a fixed schedule maintained since 3,102. The most frequently invoked conditions are:

• that the object remains where it was at the time of assessment;
• that no Librarian has since looked directly at it;
• that the quarter in which the valuation was made has ended;
• that the holder still wishes to be considered its holder.

The fourth condition has caused the greatest difficulty. In 3,441 a holder renounced an object in order to void its valuation and was informed that the renunciation had itself been valued, at a higher figure. The House upheld the second valuation and the holder remains liable. The case is taught to new Assessors as an example of the schedule working correctly.

Dispute with the Metrological Vaults

The House's authority to value is not the same as its authority to measure, and the distinction has been litigated for six centuries. The Metrological Vaults hold that any valuation implying a quantity falls within the Standard Metrological Protocols and must be referred to them before recording. The House holds that a valuation is an opinion and not a measurement, and that opinions are not referred anywhere.

"The House does not measure. It declares, and the declaration is final until contradicted, which it will be."

— Assessor Hurnal Pick, Address to the Vaults, 3,309

The Registry of Metrological Dependency records the dispute as unresolved and lists the House as a dependent body, a classification the House has never acknowledged. Delegations from the Vaults have twice attempted to install a standard weight in the eastern gallery; both weights were removed as unvalued objects and remain in storage, unvalued.

Relationship with Spiral 97

Under Amendment 9 to the Spiral Concordance, ledgers classified as Ambivalent Accounts are housed in Spiral 97. The House's own registers are frequently so classified, because a conditional valuation is by design both an asset and a liability. Since 3,517 the House has kept its working ledgers at Spiral 97 and its conclusions in the Curatorial Spire, which means that an Assessor wishing to consult the basis of a ruling must walk between them.

The arrangement was challenged in 3,688 on the grounds that the House was thereby maintaining two records of one thing. The challenge failed when it emerged that the two records disagree, and had disagreed since the third quarter of 3,520, without either office noticing.

Later rulings and the Vell grievance

In 3,801 the House ruled that an object may be valued at a sum it has already been sold for, provided the sale is described as provisional. The ruling was intended to simplify matters and produced a class of objects that are permanently for sale and never sold. Floor 450, the clearing house for Edicts of Passage disputes, has requested a list of these objects four times and received instead a list of the valuations, which it already had.

The House's current difficulties are internal. In the winter of 3,842 the secretary, Clerk Marrow Vell, submitted a memorandum observing that the House had valued the same cabinet of eleven drawers seven times since 2,914, at rising figures, without anyone having established what became of the drawers. Vell proposed that the House value the cabinet once more, as itself, and close the matter. The Assessors accepted the proposal in principle and have not scheduled the reading. The memorandum is filed, unvalued, in the eastern gallery, and Vell has asked twice that it be moved to a shelf where it can be seen. It has not been moved. All nine Assessors are understood to agree that it should be.