Pillars of Interim

The Pillars of Interim are a class of load-bearing vertical supports erected throughout the Tower under provisional authority and never subsequently confirmed. Unlike the Pillars of Certainty, which are non-material and require no maintenance, and unlike the Pillars of Intent, which are material but hold nothing up, the Pillars of Interim are physical columns of dressed stone that bear weight competently while remaining, in every legal sense, temporary. The oldest known example, Column 6-West on the Hall's lower landing, has stood since Year 803 and is scheduled for removal in Year 1040.

Definition and classification

A support is classed as a Pillar of Interim when it was raised under one of the provisional instruments and its confirmation was either refused, deferred, or never sought. The distinction is administrative rather than structural. The Interim Stacks contains several hundred such columns, all of them indistinguishable by inspection from permanent masonry, several of them carrying more than the confirmed pillars beside them. The Interim Mandate provides at clause 14 that a provisional support "may be relied upon but not cited," a formula which has caused considerable difficulty where a pillar is the sole thing holding up a room containing records about that pillar.

Construction is straightforward and need not be described here beyond noting that the stone is quarried on Floor 212 and hauled by hand, a practice the Provisional Protocols for Interim Handling permit and no one has thought to revisit.

The Alaric question

Whether the Pillars of Interim fall within the competence of Alaric of the Interim has been disputed since Year 1019, when Alaric established Interim Measure 1204 and, by its text, claimed oversight of "all interim work of a resonant character." Alaric's partisans read "resonant" broadly: any pillar occupying a chamber where sound behaves unusually therefore falls to the Interim Committee. The Interim Committee for Resonance Management, constituted under the Twelfth Interim Mandate, has taken the narrower view, holding that resonance attaches to the Screaming Pillars alone and that a silent column, however provisional, is outside its remit and outside Alaric's.

"A pillar that makes no sound is not a resonant object, and it is not the Committee's to certify, to condemn, or to move. We have said so four times."

— Interim Committee for Resonance Management, minutes of the fourth sitting, appended to Interim Measure 1204

The Committee's position has the merit of clarity and the disadvantage of leaving the pillars unsupervised by anyone. The Twelfth Interim Mandate partially validated Alaric's original action regarding auditory flora but said nothing about masonry, and there the matter rests, in the manner of most matters in the Tower.

Interaction with Pillars of Certainty

The load borne by a Pillar of Certainty is sometimes partly transferred to a nearby Pillar of Interim, a practice the Certainty surveyors call "resting the case" and discourage without prohibiting. Survey records correlate such transfers with shifts in the Certainty Coefficient (C) as computed in Margin calculation, and Margin clerks are instructed to note any provisional column within nine feet of a survey point. The instruction was added in Year 987 after a clerk in the western survey, one Ottiline Vey, certified a chamber as Certain when the certainty was in fact being carried by a temporary column she had mistaken for a buttress. Vey's certificate stood for sixty-one years. She spent much of that time drafting a memorandum arguing that a buttress and a pillar of interim are the same object under two names, a position the Sigil of Interim Silence was eventually invoked to close.

Audit and removal

Pillars of Interim are audited once every forty years by the Interim wardens, who chalk the date on the shaft and record whether the column has "settled into permanence," a phrase with no fixed meaning that has never been applied to a single pillar. Removal is authorised only where replacement support has been confirmed by two independent offices. No pillar has been removed under this provision. The wardens' returns for Year 1016 record eleven attempted removals on Floor 212, all halted when it emerged that the confirming offices had each confirmed the other's certification.

Visitors to the lower landings are asked not to lean on the chalked columns.

Inventory

The current register lists nineteen confirmed Pillars of Interim, of which the following are the most often cited:

• Column 6-West, Hall of Interim Objects, lower landing; raised Year 803
• Column 11-East, north aisle; raised Year 921, unchalked since Year 996
• The Three Sisters, west bay of the Interim Stacks; raised in a single afternoon, Year 1004, by a mason who did not file a return

The Three Sisters are the subject of an unresolved ownership question and are accordingly left out of the wardens' count while remaining, unavoidably, in the building.