Page-Sentinels

The Page-Sentinels are a custodial order of the Tower, distinct from but frequently confused with the Sentinels of the Silent Stair, charged with the guarding of pages that are in transit between floors. Where the Sentinels of the Silent Stair maintain Enforced Silence along stairwells designated as Silent Stair, the Page-Sentinels maintain nothing at all: their charge is to stand beside a page while it is being carried, and to attest that it was not read, altered, folded, or permitted to settle. The order is small, its members are never named in the public registers, and its authority rests on the Twelfth Concordance, Annex 7, which has been amended eleven times and read, by the Librarians' own accounting, four.

Origins and the question of the first carrier

The order traces its foundation to the winter of Floor 4481, when a bound volume of Clean Page Doctrine recensions was carried between the Scriptorium and a reading room two floors above and arrived with a corner turned down. The Librarian then presiding over the Scriptorium of the Interleaved Page recorded the loss in a memorandum now held as Schedule entry 22, and proposed that every subsequent transfer of a page be accompanied by a witness whose sole function was to look at the carrier rather than the page.

That proposal became the order. Its founding instrument, the Ordinance of the Second Pair of Eyes, fixes the ratio of witnesses to carriers at one to one, and requires the witness to walk backwards ahead of the carrier so that the page remains in view at all times. The ordinance does not explain how the witness is to negotiate stairs while walking backwards. The Sentinels of the Silent Stair have offered, in three separate memoranda, to loan their own stair-readers for the purpose; the offers have never been accepted.

Method and equipage

A Page-Sentinel carries a transit baton of turned ash, banded at both ends, which is used to indicate the page without touching it. The baton is held at a fixed angle of forty degrees from the vertical, a figure derived from the arm-span tables in the Twenty-Third Concordance and disputed ever since. The Sentinel also carries a tally-cord for recording the number of turns taken en route, since a page that has been carried around a corner more than twice is held to have been read by the corner.

Page-Sentinels wear Null-Gloves when the page under escort is of uncertain stock, and bare hands when it is not. The distinction matters chiefly to the Clerks of the Fixed Page, who will not accept a page from a gloved Sentinel on the grounds that a glove cannot be sworn. The Clerks' position was upheld in Determination 9-B and reversed in Determination 9-C, four days later, by the same Clerk.

"The escorting officer shall not, at any point in the transit, be able to describe what is on the page. If the officer can describe it, the page has been read, and the transit is void from the stair-head."

— Twelfth Concordance, Annex 7, clause 4

In practice Sentinels adopt a fixed gaze at the middle distance and a set of rehearsed answers to questions from passers-by, the most common of which is that they do not know and are not permitted to find out. A Sentinel who is asked twice by the same person must report the second asking to the Vigil Register. The reporting requirement has generated a substantial volume of entries, most of them concerning one porter on Floor 4481.

Relations with the other orders

The Page-Sentinels are sometimes retained by the Adherents of the Persistent Page to escort a candidate document to the Lector of the Mute Page for examination. The Adherents have twice complained that the Sentinels' backwards gait delays the procession unreasonably on the upper flights, and once that a Sentinel, walking backwards, collided with a Kinetic Page-Turner and set it running for six hours. The Aerostatic Page-Turning System was unaffected, though its diagnostic lamps were observed to flicker in a spectrum that revealed the watermark on an accompanying Unwritten Page, which no one present had asked to see.

With the School of the Unmarked Page the order maintains a formal coolness, dating from the Disputation on the Phantom Page, at which a Page-Sentinel was called to attest to the non-existence of a document and declined on the grounds that he had not been permitted to look at it. The Disputation turned on this point for two days. The Murmuration of the Fallen Page has never sought the order's services and is not expected to.

Disputed doctrine

The central disagreement in the order's literature concerns whether a Page-Sentinel may attest to a page he has escorted more than once. The Ninth Concordance holds, at clause 18, that familiarity does not constitute reading and that a Sentinel may escort the same page indefinitely. The Twelfth Concordance, Annex 7, clause 11, holds the opposite: that a second escort is a form of acquaintance, and that acquaintance with a page is indistinguishable, in the long run, from having read it. Both are cited in the order's own standing instructions, on facing pages, without comment.

A minority position, advanced by the Clerks of the Fixed Page and rejected by everyone else, is that the question is moot, since no page in the Tower has ever been successfully kept from the eyes that carried it.

Roll and current standing

The order's roll is not published. The Register of Custodial Orders, which lists every other order with its floor of operation and its founding instrument, lists the Page-Sentinels as "present, in transit," a designation that has stood since the register's third recension. Requests to correct it have been forwarded to the Sentinels of the Silent Stair in error no fewer than fourteen times.

Sentinels on duty are not to be spoken to. This applies equally to Librarians.