North-Northwest stairwell

The North-Northwest Stairwell is the northernmost of the four oblique stairwells serving the ward of Floor 19-B and the only one whose bearing does not resolve to a cardinal point under any reading permitted by the Concordance of Bearings. It is a service stairwell of one hundred and sixteen flights, rising from the landing shared with Aperture 37-G to the sub-basement beneath the Northwest Carillon. Its governing number has been disputed since 4 March 611, when the Office of Stairwell Registry opened a file on it that has never been closed.

Orientation and the bearing dispute

The stairwell takes its name from a compromise. Its treads run neither true north nor true northwest, but 22.5 degrees off cardinal north, and the Registry's original designation — North-Twenty-Two-and-a-Half — was rejected by the Guild of Framers and Demarcators as unpronounceable in formal citation. The Guild's workrooms occupy interstices of Stairwell 9-North and its surveyors were consulted twice; the second consultation produced the name now in use and an unresolved objection from the North-Eastern Stairwell Spire, which claimed the designation encroached on the office's transit rulings regarding the classification of "Eastern."

The objection was never adjudicated. It was instead accommodated by Amendment 12-b, appended following the dispute at Stairwell 44-North, which permits an oblique stairwell to bear the name of the nearest cardinal direction provided that the nearest cardinal direction is named twice. The Fifth Concordance, Annex 9 forbids precisely this construction, holding that "a doubled direction designates a corner, and no stairwell may be a corner." Readers will observe that both instruments remain in force. The Registry's practice, recorded in Registry Circular 118-NN, is to cite whichever is shorter.

Measurement irregularities

Surveyors descending the North-Northwest report a persistent lateral drift comparable to, though distinct from, the Latitudinal Lurch of Floor 88. The drift is not a leaning of the fabric; the walls are sound. It is a leaning of the stairwell's perceived bearing, measurable at 2.3 degrees over the first forty flights and corrected by nothing. The Office of Weights and Bearings has ruled that the drift is to be treated as a property of the stair, not of the surveyor, and that instruments carried down more than forty flights must be re-zeroed at the Pellinor post north of Stairwell Delta before their readings are entered in any register.

Whether the drift is constant at all depths is a matter of open disagreement. The Second Survey of the Oblique Stairwells (614) records it as steady to flight ninety-one and then absent below; the Third Survey (647) records the reverse. The difference is attributed by the Third Survey's preamble to the replacement of the survey lamps in the winter of 646, a project the Second Survey could not have anticipated.

"The stair is not the same stair it was; let surveyors state the year of their lamps."

— Third Survey of the Oblique Stairwells, preamble

The Carillon access ruling

The uppermost flights of the North-Northwest carry the only service access to the winding gear of the Northwest Carillon on Floor 1201. The stairwell was not built for this purpose; it was built to serve the ward below, and the connection was made in 588 by opening a doorway through a bearing wall that no one now claims to have surveyed. The gear-room door is locked between the third and fourth hours after midnight, and the key is kept at the foot of the stair.

Access was suspended entirely for four days in the winter of 646 following a report that the Silent Bell had been heard from the landing. The report was withdrawn by its author, Clerk Adjunct Marn Ospeth, who stated that the sound was the stairwell's own draught passing a loose hasp. Ospeth's correction is preserved in the Registry file together with a note, in a different hand, that the hasp was not loose. Ospeth subsequently requested reassignment and was refused; her grievance, that a correction should dispose of a matter once entered, remains the standard illustration in Registry training.

Holdings and citations

The North-Northwest holds no folios of its own. Its records are deposited in four places, none of which considers itself responsible for the whole.

• Office of Stairwell Registry — the unclosed file, opened 4 March 611.
• Guild of Framers and Demarcators — two consultation minutes and the original objection.
• North-Eastern Stairwell Spire — transit rulings sharing regulatory lineage with Stairwell 12-γ.
• Cartographic Annex — nothing; see Annex North, which has no floors and cannot receive deposits.

Citations should follow the form used in the Registry's own index: the bearing first, the flight second, and the year of the lamps last. Anything said of the North-Northwest Stairwell without a year of lamps is, strictly, unattributed.