Limestone Vein 44 a

Limestone Vein 44 a is the designation given to the westernmost branch of the Stairwell 44 stonework, a seam of speckled limestone that departs the main vertical artery at the ninth landing and runs laterally through the masonry of Floors 44 through 49 before terminating in a filled pocket above the Vein of Resonant Silence. It is among the most cited and least visited holdings in the catalogue: cited because every survey of the Stairwell 44 complex must account for it, and unvisited because the greater part of it is behind worked face and cannot be entered.

Nomenclature and the dispute over the suffix

The lower-case a is not a floor marking, nor an aperture letter, nor a spiral designation. It was appended by the Lapidaries of the Forbidden Vein in the course of the second calibration of the Stairwell 44 seam, when it became apparent that the lateral branch could not be recorded under the parent heading without displacing three earlier entries. The Lapidaries' field practice, set down in their customary returns, is to suffix branches alphabetically in the order in which they are cut open; Vein 44 a is therefore the first branch of Stairwell 44 to have been worked, and not, as is often assumed, the first to be discovered.

Third Concordance holds that suffixed designations are descriptive only and carry no custodial force. Ordinance Gamma-7, in a clause drafted some forty years later, holds the opposite: that a suffix "confers upon the seam a separate identity before the law, and separates its faults from those of its parent." Both instruments remain in force. The practical consequence is that a crack in Vein 44 a and a crack in Stairwell 44 proper are reported to different desks, and that the desks have not spoken since the winter of the fourth audit.

Composition and the question of the basalt

The seam is a veined, grey speckled limestone consistent in colour and grain with the facing throughout Stairwell Delta and the upper flights of Stairwell 44. It is markedly softer than Atramentous Limestone, which lines the Backwards Stairwell, and harder than the Ignorance Marble formerly used in the receiving rooms on Floor 47. Core samples taken at the ninth landing show a carbonate content of between 71 and 74 parts, with a fine dark speckling that the Lapidaries attribute to a mineral they decline to name in open returns.

A persistent difficulty concerns a band of Attenuated Basalt, some eleven centimetres thick, recorded at the 44 a / 48 junction in the original field notes and absent from every subsequent survey. The Academy of Procedural Archaeology maintains that the band was never basalt but a shadow cast by the surveyor's lamp and copied forward through four recensions. The Lapidaries maintain that it was basalt and has since been removed. Neither party has produced the lamp.

Extent and the sealed terminus

The seam is open to inspection at two points only: the ninth landing of Stairwell 44, where a recessed panel has been left unpointed since the third construction phase, and a service aperture above the Vein of Resonant Silence on Floor 47, reached by ladder and closed by a hatch that is painted on the landing side and unmarked on the seam side. The intervening length is worked face.

"The branch runs where it runs. We are not asked to follow it, only to know that it is there, and to sign for it once in each audit."

— Senior Scribe Althaea, marginal note to the Floor 47 returns

The terminus above the Vein of Resonant Silence is a filled pocket of rubble and mortar, entered in the catalogue as sealed and in the Lapidaries' working ledger as sealed pending — a distinction that has never been defined and which the audits have never resolved. A hatch at the Floor 47 end is to be left on its hook. Visitors are asked not to bring lamps into the pocket; the mortar is old and the dust is fine.

Custody and the grievance of Clerk Orwin

Custody of Vein 44 a was assigned at various times to the Lapidaries, to the survey desk of Stairwell 44, and, briefly and controversially, to the quarry clerks of the Silent Quarries of Floor 117, who held that any limestone contiguous with the Dogmatic Vein fell within their returns. The last claim was never formally refused; it lapsed.

The clearest record of the confusion is the grievance of Clerk Orwin of the survey desk, filed in the ninth year and never closed. Orwin had reported a hairline crack at the ninth-landing panel in three successive returns. The first return was answered by the Lapidaries, who returned it endorsed not our seam. The second was answered by the quarry clerks, who returned it endorsed not our floor. The third was returned unopened, with a note that the matter had been resolved under Ordinance Gamma-7. Orwin's final entry reads, in full: "It has not." The crack has since widened by some four millimetres and is now cited by both desks as evidence that the other desk has been negligent.

Comparanda

The seam is sometimes confused with the shelving stock drawn from the Shelving from the Dogmatic Quarries, which shares its speckling but not its bedding, and with the latent seams indexed but not worked in the Index of Latent Veins, where a heading for Vein 44 a appears with the annotation see parent. The Index of Latent Veins entry has never been expanded. Readers seeking the parent seam should consult Stairwell 44; readers seeking the branch will find it where it has always been, which is behind the panel.