Keeper of Temporary Jurisdictions

The Keeper of Temporary Jurisdictions is the officer of the Librarians charged with assigning, delimiting, and dissolving jurisdictions that exist for a stated duration. The post is currently held in an acting capacity by Keeper Aurin Vess, whose commission has been renewed at intervals of eleven days since the winter of floor 4,118 and has never been confirmed. The office maintains the Register of Ephemeral Statutes, the master ledger reconciling spatial torsion measurements, and shares seam-measurement duties with the Office of the Keeper of Measures under the terms of the Sixth Concordance, Annex 9.

Because the Keeper's jurisdictions expire by their own terms, the office is unusual among the Tower's administrations in that it is never entirely certain how much of it is currently in existence. Keeper Vess has declined to resolve this question, noting in a marginal memorandum of 14 Ember that "the office survives its jurisdictions, as the stair survives its treads" (Keeper Aurin Vess, memorandum to the Office of the Keeper of Precedents).

Origins and the Second Recension

The keepership was carved out of the older Office of the Keeper of Stairs by the Second Recension of the Concordances, which transferred all jurisdictions of fewer than forty days' standing to a separate hand. The Recension's drafters appear to have intended a modest arrangement: a desk, a seal, and a shelf of lapsed writs. Instead the office inherited some nine hundred temporary jurisdictions then in force, including four that had already expired and one, the Hanging Annex of Floor 3,006, that had been dissolved twice and remained listed.

For seventy years thereafter the Keeper sat in a single chair in the Stairwell of Minor Jurisdictions, receiving petitions on a folding table. The Eleventh Concordance formalised the office's right to appoint deputies, though it forbade those deputies from being appointed for longer than the jurisdictions they supervised, a provision that has produced at least one instance of a deputy ceasing to exist in the middle of a sentence.

Method

A temporary jurisdiction is created by the issue of a writ specifying its boundaries, its stated duration, and the conditions of its dissolution. The Keeper is required to measure the jurisdiction's seams at the point of assignment, at the midpoint of its duration, and at dissolution, and to enter all three measurements in the Register against the corresponding entry in the Grand Unified Ledger. Discrepancies above one-third of a span are referred to the Office of the Keeper of Measures for arbitration, and below that figure are smoothed silently, a practice known as Quiet Reconciliation.

Quiet Reconciliation has been the subject of two inquiries. In the first, the Committee for Non-Intersecting Jurisdictions objected that smoothing concealed the gradual drift of jurisdictions whose seams met at oblique angles, and proposed that all discrepancies be published. The Office of Dimensional Integrity, which had relied on the smoothed figures for its own calculations since its removal from the Stairwell, argued against publication on the grounds that its ledgers would require eleven years to rebalance. The second inquiry was never concluded, the jurisdiction under which it was convened having lapsed.

Contested Precedence among Lapsed Writs

The office's most persistent difficulty is not the management of live jurisdictions but the precedence of dead ones. Because a lapsed writ retains its seals and numbers, disputes frequently arise over which of two expired jurisdictions would have taken precedence had both survived. These disputes are referred to the Office of the Keeper of Precedents, which has held since the Ninth Concordance that a lapsed writ outranks a live one of lower number, but not a live one of higher number, a rule that the Committee for Ontological Review has twice described as incoherent.

The cost of the arrangement is borne chiefly by Keeper Vess, who must certify each precedence before it is recorded. In the matter of the Twofold Quay and the Western Reading Room, both dissolved in the same hour of floor 2,741, Vess certified precedence in favour of the Quay, then reversed the certification, then reinstated it, and finally entered both in the Register as "co-terminous, precedence unassigned," a formula the Office of the Keeper of Precedents has since adopted in forty-one cases.

The Edict of Tangled Jurisdiction

Where the boundaries of two temporary jurisdictions cannot be separated without dissolving one of them, the Keeper may invoke the Edict of Tangled Jurisdiction, forming an Inspection Cadre drawn from the members of the contesting jurisdictions and vesting it with their combined powers. The Edict was intended as a rare instrument. It has been invoked sixty-three times, most notably during the Winter of Overlapping Stairwells, when a single Cadre accumulated the powers of nine jurisdictions and briefly held authority over the Somatic Stacks and the Atrium of the Unspoken Query at once. The Office of the Keeper of Unspoken Components objected in writing; the Cadre dissolved before the objection could be served.

Disputed Questions

Two questions remain open. The first is whether the Keeper's own post is itself a temporary jurisdiction. The Fourth Concordance describes the keepership as "a jurisdiction of the Tower, held for a stated duration," while the Seventh Concordance lists it among the standing offices. If the former reading holds, the office lapsed some centuries ago, and Keeper Vess's renewals are the renewals of nothing. The Office of the Keeper of Precedents has declined to rule, observing that the question cannot be put without first determining which Concordance governs it, which is itself a question of temporary jurisdiction.

The second is smaller and, in the view of the Bureau of Jurisdictional Clarity, more pressing: whether the Register of Ephemeral Statutes should record jurisdictions that lapse before they can be written down. Keeper Vess has ruled that it should not, and that such jurisdictions are to be entered as "noted and withdrawn." Visitors to the office are asked not to stand in the doorway during the measurement of seams.