The
Procedures of the Quiet are the body of standing instructions governing surveillance and security functions throughout the Tower. They are administrative rather than ceremonial, and are distinguished from the
Ceremony of the Quiet Weight on the ground that a procedure may be performed by anyone holding the relevant warrant, whereas a ceremony may not be performed correctly by anyone at all. The Procedures are maintained in common by the
Quiet Council and the
Quiet Bureau Custodians, the same joint arrangement under which those bodies administer the
Quiet Codicil and hold the standing charter of the Furnace of Quiet Oblivion. Copies are kept on every floor bearing a Quiet holding; the master recension is filed with the master leaf of the
Librarians' Quiet and has not been consulted directly since 4 Ember 1994, when the seal was found intact but the box empty. ## Scope and warrant A procedure is not in force until it has been warranted, and a warrant is not valid until it has been countersigned by the office it inconveniences. The standard countersignature sheet carries eleven boxes, of which two are never filled: the Procedures are silent on their purpose, and the
Quiet Guard has declined to speculate in writing on four separate occasions. The remaining nine are sufficient for ordinary business. Records for the winter of the year 88 (Floor 611) show a warrant countersigned eight times and then defeated by a smudge across the ninth box, which the
Quiet Bureau Custodians ruled an absence rather than an erasure and therefore not correctable. The post stood vacant for eleven months. ## Patrol and observation Observation duties are assigned by
Ambient Absences, the register of things that are not where they should be. A patrol is dispatched when an absence persists across three successive readings and is not accounted for by a scheduled movement. Patrols walk in pairs, one counting and one remembering, and neither may do both. The counting member carries the tally; the remembering member carries nothing, and is forbidden to make notes, since a note is a second tally and two tallies are a discrepancy waiting to be filed. The pairing rule derives from the
Concordance of Quiet Rooms, which holds that "a thing observed twice is an inventory; a thing observed once is a rumour." The phrasing is admired and has never been applied without argument. A minority reading, advanced by the Custodians' third annexe, takes "twice" to mean twice by the same observer, which would make the pairs redundant and the counting member's tally the sole record. The Council has not ruled on the point. Patrols continue in pairs. ## The Quiet Floors The Procedures operate differently on floors designated Quiet under the
Quiet Floors ordinances, chiefly because those ordinances contradict one another on the status of the
Quiet Stair in
Spiral 94. One recension treats the Stair as a corridor and applies the ordinary patrol interval of forty minutes. Another treats it as an aperture and forbids descent entirely. A third, later and shorter, treats it as a corridor for the purposes of patrol and an aperture for the purposes of reporting, which produces the difficulty that a patrol may lawfully walk down and may not lawfully say that it has. Since 1971 the Guard has resolved this by walking down and reporting nothing, and the arrangement has held. ## The Pell amendment The most litigated provision in the Procedures is the amendment entered by Clerk Ondrey Pell in 2038, which requires that any procedure suspended during an emergency be reinstated "in the form it then held, and not in the form it was about to hold." The intention was to prevent quiet revision during the closure of the lower observation galleries. Its effect was to restore an earlier version of the patrol interval that had been superseded for good reason, and to require the reinstatement of a warrant that had never been valid. The
Quiet Council upheld the amendment in 2041 and the
Quiet Bureau Custodians upheld it again in 2043, in each case without addressing what was to be done with the invalid warrant. Pell's own marginal note, preserved in the working copy, reads: "They have agreed with me twice and I am no further forward." The note is the only remark of Pell's that survives; his grievance against the Custodians' registry, which he pursued from 2039 until his transfer, is recorded nowhere else. ## Maintenance and dispute The Procedures require that surveillance apparatus be calibrated against the
Quiet Forge on Floor 888 before each quarter's patrol roster is posted, and that the calibration be witnessed by a member of the
Quiet-Masons who has not previously witnessed a calibration on that floor. The rule is intended to prevent familiarity. It has instead produced a small circuit of witnesses who rotate between three floors and are familiar with all of them. Disputes arising under the Procedures go first to the
Quiet Bureaus, then to the Council, then to the Custodians, and thereafter to whichever of the two will hear the matter. Filing is by sealed annexe; unsealed submissions are returned with the seal affixed by the registry and the fee charged twice.