Joral

Joral is the collective designation for the four bell-keepers of the Ninth Recess, a service corridor of the Tower whose bells are heard on no floor and whose accounts are audited annually by a clerk who has never been admitted to it. The name derives from the Joral Register, the bound ledger in which the keepers record each sounding, and by extension from the keepers themselves, who are listed in it only by office and never by name. The post is hereditary, though the inheritance is contested in a manner described below.

Origins and the Founding Order

The Ninth Recess was struck out of an unassigned interval between the Fourth Landing and the Weeping Balustrade in the winter of the year recorded as 311 by the Reckoning of the Annexes, some nine years after the Elaran Protocol first fixed the dimensions of service corridors. The Third Concordance, Annex 2, clause 7, required that every corridor of measurable length be assigned a bell so that its presence could be established without entering it:

"No passage shall be held to exist which cannot be heard from somewhere."

— Third Concordance, Annex 2, clause 7

The Ninth Recess, being 41 paces long and 2 paces wide, received four bells rather than one, on the reasoning of the Survey Office of the Inner Floors that a corridor of its proportions would otherwise be underheard at its midpoint. The four bells are hung at intervals of eleven paces and are tuned to a chord that the Survey Office declined to name. The keepers were appointed in the same season; the first entry in the Joral Register is dated the 14th of that winter and reads, in full, "Sounded. Not heard. Sounded again."

The Register and Its Method

The Joral Register is a folio volume of 612 leaves, rebound four times, currently held in the Scriptorium of Minor Offices. Entries are made in the hand of whichever keeper is on duty and record the hour, the bell, and the fact of sounding. No entry records a response, since none has ever been observed. The Seventh Concordance, which governs the keeping of service records, permits this omission under a provision now known as the Silence Allowance, which holds that a record may be complete without recording an effect provided the cause is recorded with sufficient particularity. The keepers have taken advantage of the Silence Allowance with what the auditing clerk Maren Ost once described in a marginal note as "a thoroughness bordering on the devotional."

The Register is audited each year in the second week after the Feast of Unopened Doors. The audit is conducted in the corridor outside the Recess, since the Writ of Sealed Interiors bars the auditing clerk from entry. The keepers pass the Register through a hatch of 9 inches by 6 inches. Maren Ost has audited the volume for nineteen consecutive years and has never seen any of the keepers' faces, a circumstance she records each year in identical language: "Volume received in good order. Keepers not observed. No discrepancy."

Inheritance and the Ostend Claim

Succession among the Joral is by nomination of the outgoing keeper, subject to confirmation by the Office of Hereditary Posts. In 402 the office received the Ostend Claim, brought by a candidate who asserted descent from the second keeper through a line of females, the Register recording offices only and therefore being silent on the question. The claim was argued for eleven years across three sittings of the Court of Minor Continuities. Its resolution turned on the Omega Discrepancy: the claimant's genealogy relied on a date that appears differently in two recensions of the Fourth Concordance, and the Court held that a descent resting on a discrepant date could not be confirmed without resolving the discrepancy, which the Court lacked authority to do.

The claim was therefore neither allowed nor dismissed but placed in abeyance, in which state it has remained for 61 years. The Office of Hereditary Posts maintains a separate file for it, and the file is consulted whenever a Joral post falls vacant, not because it bears on the vacancy but because the office's Standing Instruction 14 requires all abeyant claims touching a post to be read aloud before the post is filled. The reading takes an afternoon. The current keepers have requested that it be moved to the morning.

Dispute: Whether the Joral Are Persons

A persistent scholarly disagreement concerns the standing of the keepers. The Commentary on Service Offices (revised edition, 388) argues that the Joral are not persons but a single continuous office held in four parts, on the ground that the Register records no individual and the bells are struck in a fixed rotation that no keeper has varied. The Annals of the Ninth Recess, a shorter and more acrimonious work, rejects this on the ground that a rotation requires someone to keep to it, and that the Writ of Sealed Interiors would be meaningless if there were no one inside to seal in.

The dispute has practical consequences. If the Joral are an office, the Silence Allowance applies to them directly and their records need no further attestation. If they are persons, each keeper requires individual attestation under the Seventh Concordance, Annex 9, which the Office of Hereditary Posts has never been able to obtain, since attestation requires the attestor to observe the attestee, and observation is barred. The Office has resolved the difficulty by the expedient of attesting the post and noting the incumbent as "present in the manner customary to the Recess." The formula has never been challenged. Maren Ost has twice declined to comment on it in writing.

Access and Maintenance

The Ninth Recess is entered by a door at the end of the Fourth Landing, which is kept locked from the inside. Requests for access are directed to the Office of Hereditary Posts and are granted only to persons carrying a bell of their own, on the reasoning of the Survey Office that a visitor who cannot be heard from somewhere does not, for the duration of the visit, exist. Three such visits are recorded: in 344, 371, and 519. Each visitor reported the corridor as "shorter than stated." The Survey Office has measured it four times and stands by its figure.

Maintenance of the bells falls to the Guild of Small Metals, whose representatives are admitted twice yearly to oil the headstocks. They work in silence and are not spoken to. The Guild's invoice for the year 604 lists four headstocks oiled, four clappers inspected, and one ladder replaced, and is signed with a mark the Office of Accounts has accepted without question since the Guild began submitting it.