Order of the Tuned Pin

Overview

Order of the Tuned Pin is a sub-order of the Librarians charged with the joint custodianship of the Tuned Aeolian Shafts and, by a narrower grant of the Fourth Concordance, the sole custodianship of Floor 743. The Order takes its name from the tuning pin used to alter the pitch of a stringed instrument; in the Order's own ceremonial usage, each admitted member is presented with a pin of blued steel, unsharpened, which is not to be used on any instrument and is retained for the duration of the member's service.

The Order maintains its scriptorium on Floor 743 and a subsidiary annex on Floor 118, where the joint administration with the Vertical Cartographers' Guild is recorded. Membership numbers are not published. Estimates in circulation range from forty to three hundred, and the Order has declined to correct any of them.

Relation to the Tuned Aeolian Shafts

The Tuned Aeolian Shafts are twenty-three service risers proportioned and lined to produce fixed pitches when air moves through them. Custodianship is shared with the Vertical Cartographers' Guild, which supplies the sounding records; the Order supplies the tuning judgments. Under the Ventral Registry regime, the full throat-sounding pitch of each shaft is entered in the Guild's hand, countersigned by a member of the Order, and sealed. Disagreement between the two bodies over the correct countersignature on Shaft IX in the winter of the Third Recension was resolved only when the Third Concordance was amended to permit a countersignature by two Order members acting independently — a clause that has since been invoked four times, twice by the same pair.

The Order's tuning judgments are advisory where they concern shafts under Guild survey and binding where they concern shafts on Floor 743. This distinction has produced at least two documented instances of a shaft being reclassified mid-inspection in order to settle which standard applied.

Custodianship of Floor 743

The sole custodianship of Floor 743 was granted to the Order by the Fourth Concordance, Annexe 2, and is reaffirmed in the Third Concordance with different wording. The floor contains the Order's scriptorium, a store of blued-steel pins, and a chamber known as the Quiet Room, in which no resonant object may be brought. The prohibition is enforced at the doorway by inspection rather than by any technical means; visitors are asked to leave Resonance Dampeners, sounding bars, and unfixed stonework outside. A visiting rule recorded in the Order's own register adds that shoes with wooden heels are not admitted after dusk, a measure attributed to a complaint from the scriptorium floor that has not otherwise been preserved.

The Order has resisted every attempt to seat a second body on Floor 743. A proposal to establish a branch of the Sub-Order of Refractive Instruments on the floor was withdrawn after correspondence that occupies eleven folios in the Order's annals.

Standing disputes

The principal standing dispute concerns whether the Order's authority over tuning extends to instruments that are not pins. The Order holds that tuning, being a judgment about pitch, falls naturally to those charged with the custody of tuned objects, and has twice asserted a claim over the tuning of the Sympathetic Lyre. The Guild of Resonant Masons, which constructs the Lyre from a single tuned block, disputes the claim on the grounds that the Lyre is tuned at the quarry and not thereafter. A third position, advanced by the Hush Order, holds that the matter is outside all three bodies' competence.

A secondary dispute concerns the Order's relationship to Resonant Markers installed by the Resonance Technicians' Guild. The Order maintains that markers falling within Shaft territory require its countersignature; the Technicians' Guild maintains that the markers are self-tuning and require none. The Clerk of the Third Order who attempted to mediate in the matter recorded that neither party would accept a demonstration on the grounds that a demonstration would constitute tuning.

Notable members

The Order does not publish its roll. Among the members whose names appear in Concordance citations are the wardens who countersigned the Shaft IX settlement, the drafter of the pin-prohibition clause, and the member who, in the course of a joint survey, recorded that a shaft had been heard but not found. That entry — "auditus, non inventus" — remains in the Ventral Registry without further comment, and no subsequent survey has located the shaft to which it refers.

See also

• Tuned Aeolian Shafts
• Fourth Concordance
• Ventral Registry
• Order of Syntacticians
• Order of Amanuenses