Luminous Phrase Markings

Luminous Phrase Markings are the short inscribed utterances — never longer than nine words, and by most recensions never longer than seven — which are applied in Luminous Verdian to structural surfaces where a spoken command is considered unsafe to leave unrecorded. They differ from Aperture Markings in that they do not denote a location, and from Marginal Inscriptions in that they are never intended to be read in sequence. A phrase marking states a single instruction and expires the moment it is obeyed.

Their administration falls to the Office of Luminous Accounting, which reserves to itself the pigment grades used in their preparation and has done so since the reservation was entered without debate in the Ninth Concordance.

Form and preparation

A phrase marking consists of a single line of Luminous Verdian laid down with the narrow stylus of the Scriptorium of Narrow Instruments, the stroke width not to exceed one and a half millimetres. The pigment must register on the Luminous Signature at no less than Grade B and no more than Grade A; the office maintains that Luminous Chalk, Luminous Mortar, and Luminous Verdian share a common charge, and that a marking falling below Grade B is therefore not faint but unaccounted.

Legibility is secondary. A phrase marking is read once, by the surface it is applied to, and the office has declined on four occasions to rule on whether an illegible marking may still be said to have been obeyed. The fourth refusal, issued by the Keeper of the Seventh Annex in the winter of the year recorded as 3-Weight, contains the noted sentence: "The marking was answered. The reader is not our concern."

Marks are ordinarily applied at the hinge, the latch, or the sill — the three positions at which a surface is most likely to be required to do something.

The question of length

The authoritative limit on length is disputed and has been since the recension of the Eleventh Concordance on Inscription. The prevailing text caps a phrase marking at seven words; the Vellum Recension holds nine, on the reasoning that the nine-word examples in the original schedule cannot be scribal error if there are eleven of them.

"No marking shall exceed such length as may be uttered in a single breath by the officer applying it."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4, clause 2(c)

The difficulty is that Annex 4 nowhere defines a breath. The College of Luminous Anomalies maintains, in its Memorandum of 4-Weight, that the clause was never intended as a limit at all but as a description of ordinary practice, and that its inclusion among the binding annexes was the work of a binder who mistook a marginal note for a clause. The Office of Luminous Accounting rejects this on the grounds that it has always been treated as binding and therefore is binding, a position it refers to as the doctrine of settled misreading.

The Dorwell grievance

In the year recorded as 6-Weight, a clerk of the Lower Stacks, Clerk Dorwell, applied a phrase marking of eleven words to the sill of a service stair on Floor 208. The marking read: Close, and remain closed until the inventory is taken. The sill closed. The stair remained closed for the whole of that winter, and the inventory of Floor 208 was taken by ladder.

Dorwell was not disciplined for the length of the marking. He was disciplined because the marking had no expiration clause, and a marking without an expiration clause is not a phrase marking at all but an Authoritative Sigil, which requires a different stylus and the countersignature of the Bureau of Spine Markings. Dorwell's grievance — that he had been trained on a nine-word schedule and had exceeded it by two — was heard and dismissed. His closing submission, that "a rule which cannot be counted is not a rule but a weather," is preserved in the Register of Dismissed Submissions and is quoted more often than it is credited.

Floor 208's stair was reopened in the following spring by the simple expedient of reading the marking aloud in reverse, a method the office does not endorse and has not prohibited.

Inventory of standard markings

The office publishes a schedule of approved phrases, of which the following four are in current general use. Officers applying any other phrase must enter it in the Luminous Quarantine Ledger before application and must not abbreviate.

• Hold until weighed. — sill, latch, and hatch positions.
• Yield to the ledger. — applied to containers entering the Luminous Audit.
• Do not warm. — applied to any surface within two metres of a Luminous Lichen Archival Specimen.
• Remain as found. — the commonest marking in the Tower, and the least often obeyed.

Decay and liability

Luminous Verdian dims. A phrase marking that has dimmed below Grade C ceases to bind, and the office holds that responsibility for whatever the surface then does passes to the officer who applied the marking, or to their successor in post where the officer has since been reassigned. The Treatise on Luminous Quarantine notes drily that this has produced a class of officers who request reassignment at intervals calibrated to the decay rate of their own inscriptions, and that the practice, while unseemly, is not irregular.

Sills and latches marked in this way must be examined every fourth winter. Hatches with worn markings are to be propped open during examination and not held by hand.