Lacustrine Concordat

The Lacustrine Concordat is a watertight instrument of agreement concluded between the Drowned Bench and the Office of Standing Water in the concordat year 1409, and amended by rider on eleven subsequent occasions, of which nine remain legible. It governs the ownership, depth, and permitted reflection of every standing body of water within the Tower above Floor 400, and is the only Concordance whose text is stored submerged. Copies circulate on dry floors, but the authoritative recension lies in a sealed cistern on Floor 712, and disputes are settled by lowering a clerk to read it.

The Concordat is not to be confused with the Doctrine of Contained Flow, which concerns moving water, nor with the Hydromantic Manuscripts, which concern water that has been asked questions. The Lacustrine Concordat concerns water that has been left alone and wishes to remain so.

Origin and the Question of the Fourth Bank

The Concordat arose from a boundary dispute of unusual duration. The Drowned Bench, a body of adjudicators who conduct all hearings while standing waist-deep, claimed jurisdiction over the still pools of the middle floors. The Office of Standing Water, which maintains them, claimed ownership of the water itself and merely tolerated the Bench's presence in it. Neither side could produce a document older than the other, because both had been keeping their records in the same pool.

The compromise, drafted over four days by the clerk Aurelia Vant, established that the Bench holds jurisdiction over the surface and the Office over the volume, with the bed of any pool held in common and referred to in the text as the Fourth Bank. Vant's marginal note, preserved in the submerged recension, reads: "The Fourth Bank has no members and meets never. It has nonetheless been quorum at every hearing since."

Principal Clauses

Clause 3 fixes the minimum depth of a lacustrine body at two conduit lengths, below which it is reclassified as a puddle and falls under the Ordinance of Shallow Waters. Clause 7 forbids the introduction of any reflective object into a pool during a hearing, on the grounds that the Bench "has been twice deceived by its own faces." Clause 9 requires that any pool found to be reflecting a floor other than the one it occupies be reported at once to the Parallactic Reading office, which maintains a register of such occurrences and has never explained it.

Clause 14, the most litigated, provides that a pool within three conduit lengths of a primary archetype shall be considered resonant until proven otherwise. The wording is acknowledged in the Concordat's own annex to be borrowed from Clause 14 of Concordat 112, Regarding Tertiary Manifestations, a borrowing the Bench has never forgiven and mentions at every opportunity.

"The Bench does not dispute the number. The Bench disputes the water."

— Drowned Bench, Procedural Minute 2,041

The Winter of the Cold One Before the Concordat

In the winter recorded only as the cold one before the concordat, the pool on Floor 717 froze to a depth of nine inches, an event the Office of Standing Water had classified as impossible and therefore had not insured against. The ice bore the weight of a full hearing before anyone noticed, and the Bench delivered judgment in a case that had been pending since 1388. When the thaw came, the judgment was found to have been written on the underside of the ice and was lost. The Office declined to accept responsibility, citing the Aperture Seal Directive 7-Alpha, which had been used to seal Aperture 12 that same winter and which the Office argued had altered the local thermal character of the floor. The Bench has never accepted this, and the case remains pending, now in its fourth century, on the grounds that a judgment delivered and then melted was still delivered.

Amendment and the Vant Grievance

Of the eleven riders, the fourth is the most consequential and the least read. It transferred custody of the submerged recension from the Bench to the Office, on the reasoning that the Office already maintained the water and could therefore maintain the text. Aurelia Vant, who had drafted the original and had expected to keep the document, recorded a formal grievance in the margin of the dry copy on Floor 719. The grievance occupies four lines and is written upside down. It has never been answered, and by Clause 22 of the Concordat, unanswered grievances in the margin acquire the status of annexes after one hundred years. Vant's grievance is therefore an annex, and the Office is obliged to read it aloud at the opening of each session, which it does, quickly.

Scholarly Disagreement

The Cartesian Indexers hold that the Lacustrine Concordat is void, on the grounds that the Concordance of Divided Labours assigns all instruments of divided jurisdiction to a single office, and a Concordat between two offices is therefore a contradiction in form. The Indexers Guild rejects this reading, noting that the Divided Labours concordat has itself been maintained by two offices since its establishment and that the Indexers' argument, taken seriously, would void their own authority first. The Antipodean Collective has mapped the Lacustrine Concordat against the Antipodal Concordat and reports that the Fourth Bank is the constitutionally mandated opposite of the surface, a finding the Bench has neither confirmed nor denied, having declined to discuss it while wet.

Disputes are heard on the second and fourth of each month. Attendees are asked to bring their own towel and to leave it outside the pool.