Liaison Corps to the Librarianate

Scope and standing

The Liaison Corps to the Librarianate is the standing body charged with carrying the correspondence of the Librarian Corps between the deliberating chamber of the Fourth Librarianate and the several liaison offices that operate on the Tower's middle registers. It was constituted by Concordance 14,742, Annex 9, and has since been reorganised twice — most recently under the Sixth Librarianate, whose warrant dissolved the earlier Circuit of Couriers and folded its members into the present Corps. The Corps maintains no permanent floor of its own; its members are billeted in six rooms off the Landing of Erratic Verdicts, which they share with the seasonal staff of the Registrar Corps. Corps membership stands at thirty-one couriers, four chief couriers, and a single Keeper of the Seal who does not travel. Selection is by sponsorship from sitting members of the Librarianate, per the Librarianate Sponsorship process, and confirmed by the Third Librarianate's older ordinance on passage rights, which remains in force despite the successive changes of governing body. The confirmation is largely ceremonial; the practical test is whether a candidate can traverse the Landing of Erratic Verdicts during a verdict without being addressed.

Duties of the Corps

The Corps' primary obligation is the delivery of sealed despatches between the chamber and the outlying offices, including the Office of Dimensional Liaison, the Avian Liaison Office, and the Liaison for Indeterminate Verticals. A courier who presents a despatch is entitled to read the acknowledgement aloud before two witnesses, and the acknowledgement is then recorded in the Corps' own register, which the Transcription Corps reproduces quarterly for the archive. Despatches bearing the Keeper's seal may not be set down, even to rest, between origin and destination; a courier who breaks this rule forfeits the run and is reassigned to the Landing, where the walking is shorter. The Corps is also responsible for notifying each office of changes to the Concordance that touch its jurisdiction. This duty has produced the Corps' only enduring quarrel. When Concordance 14,742 amended the passage rights of the sub-basement, the notifying courier delivered the notice to the Sub-basement Cataloguing Corps one floor too high, and the Cataloguing Corps continued to collect the older toll for a further eleven months. The matter was settled by a ruling that the courier's error stood, on the grounds that the Cataloguing Corps had accepted the notice in good faith; the lost tolls were not recovered.

"A courier is not required to verify the contents of what he carries, only the correctness of where he leaves it."

— Concordance 14,742, Annex 9, Clause 3

Relations with the Librarianate

The Corps reports nominally to the sitting Librarianate, but in practice it reports to whoever is holding the seal that week. Under the Seventh Librarianate the Keeper of the Seal has been absent from the chamber for three consecutive sessions, and the four chief couriers have taken to circulating drafts among themselves before depositing them, which has halved the number of formal deliveries and doubled the number of corrected drafts reaching the Bureau of Guild Liaison Amp Compliance. The Bureau has lodged a complaint; the complaint has been delivered twice. Disputes between the Corps and individual Librarians are adjudicated by the Audit Liaison, who sits on the Landing and has ruled, among other things, that a courier detained by a Librarian for conversation is on the clock, while a courier detained by a Librarian for reassignment is not. Chief Courier Halbreck's protest against this distinction is filed as Grievance 88, and remains unanswered.

Uniform and marking

Corps couriers are identified by a grey sash with a stitched vertical line, the length of which denotes seniority: the Keeper's sash reaches the floor, while first-year couriers wear eleven inches. Visitors to the Landing may notice that the verticals are all slightly different lengths, which the Corps attributes to shrinkage rather than to the progression of ranks; the discrepancy has been the subject of two audits and one inconclusive measurement in a damp winter. Sashes are not to be exchanged, loaned, or worn inverted, the last prohibition dating from an incident in which a courier delivering to the Inter-Departmental Liaison was mistaken for a departing one and turned back three times.

Contested chronology

The precise date of the Corps' founding is disputed. Concordance 14,742 gives the date of constitution, but the Fourth Librarianate records the first delivery as having occurred some months earlier, which would place the Corps' origin under the Third Librarianate. The Fifth Librarianate's account attributes the founding to a private arrangement between two couriers and a bored Librarian, and holds that the Concordance merely regularised what had already been happening on the Landing for some time. The Librarianate's own annals are silent. The standing position of the archive, per the ruling recorded in the register's front matter, is that all three accounts are correct in their own terms and that the discrepancy shall not be raised again in the presence of the Keeper. The Keeper of the Seal, asked to comment for the third recension of this article, returned the enquiry unopened.

See also

• Librarian Corps
• Liaison for Inter-Floor Topological Accord
• Transcription Corps
• Concordance 14,742