Quartermaster of Attenuants

The Quartermaster of Attenuants is the standing office responsible for the measurement, rationing, and issuance of attenuated light throughout the upper spirals of the Tower. The post is among the oldest continuously occupied in the Librarian establishment, though its founding date is disputed and its seal has been recut at least four times. The Quartermaster of Attenuants does not supervise the manufacture of attenuation equipment — that falls to the workshops attached to the Galleries of Attenuated Light — but determines who may draw how much of it, and on what evidence of need. Holders of the office are addressed as "the Quartermaster" without further designation, a courtesy that has caused persistent confusion with the Quartermaster of Armaments, with whom the office shares a number of duties, a strongroom corridor, and no small quantity of grievance.

Duties and jurisdiction

The office maintains the leger of draws, a continuous register in which every issuance of attenuated light is recorded by floor, aperture, and hour. No luminary may lawfully be lit at reduced intensity in the upper spirals without an entry in the leger, and no entry may be made without a certified statement of need from the requisitioning floor. The Quartermaster keeps the only master copy; subordinate copies are kept in the Attenuation Galleries and at the eastern head of the Eastern Auxiliary Ladder, whose distance from the office is a standing point of procedural complaint.

In practice, the office discharges four functions:

• certification of attenuation lenses issued to floor wardens, in consultation with the Calx School;
• allocation of stored light during periods of general dimming;
• audit of the leger against the draw-slips surrendered at each aperture;
• and the levying of clerical penalties for unrecorded lumination.

Attenuants themselves — the graded filters by which a luminary is brought down to a sanctioned intensity — remain workshop property. The Quartermaster issues them, brands them, and reclaims them, but does not cut them.

The Leger and the Calibration Cycle

Each attenuation lens issued by the office is stamped with a calibration mark and assigned a cycle number. A lens may be used for nine cycles before re-calibration at the Calx School, after which it is returned under seal or, if found to have drifted beyond tolerance, broken in the presence of a clerk. The breaking is recorded in the leger's margin, in red, with the name of the witnessing clerk. Surviving margin entries from the seventh and eighth centuries are the primary source for the office's early history, since the body of the leger from that period was lost in the Great Dimming and its surviving folios dispersed into the general holdings.

Disputes over measurement are referred to the Bureaux of Standard Light, whose published tolerances have been amended eleven times since the office's founding. Practising quartermasters generally treat the current tolerances as advisory and the leger's own arithmetic as binding.

The Office in the Dispute of the Mirrored Helmets

The office is not a party to the Mirrored Helmets dispute, but it was drawn into it. Following the rejected delivery at Annex Ξ.44.7, the Quartermaster of Armaments revised several standard requisition forms, among them Form 41-A — the form by which attenuated light is formally declined. The revised version carried a reflected column for the entry of "correspondent intensity," a field absent from the office's own seal copy. The Quartermaster of Attenuants declined to disburse against Form 41-A for a period of some fourteen months, honouring instead the unrevised form, and the resultant backlog was cited in Concordance 17 as an instance of the provisional holding of unissued light.

The office continues to refuse Form 41-A. The refusal is minuted annually and has never been reversed.

Succession and the Sealed Question

Appointment to the office is by sealed question: the candidate is asked, in the presence of two Librarians, how much light a floor is owed. There is no recorded correct answer, and no indication that an incorrect one prevents appointment. The question is nevertheless retained, and candidates who answer with a quantity are recorded as having answered with a quantity.

Where two quartermasters are simultaneously in post — a situation that has arisen four times, most recently in a dispute settled only by the relocation of a strongroom door — the leger is kept jointly, in alternating hands, and the office's seal is divided. The divided seal has never been reunited in more than ceremonial form, and the ceremonial form is filed as a separate instrument.

Contested points

The Concordances disagree on the principal matter of the office's remit. Concordance 31 (On the Leger of Draws) holds that the leger is a public register and may be consulted by any warden with a duly stamped tablet; Concordance 44 (On the Sealed Leger) holds that the leger is closed and that the office may not be compelled to produce any entry prior to the current cycle. Both instruments remain in force. The office has responded by maintaining two legers, one sealed and one open, and by the standing practice of recording a thing twice where it matters.

Disagreement likewise attends the office's relation to the Lens itself. One line of annotation, current in the galleries, holds that the Quartermaster of Attenuants is the Lens's keeper and answerable for its condition; the opposing view, supported by the office's own seal-folios, holds that the Lens keeps the office, being the instrument by which its authority is measured and the office merely the hand that reads it. Neither view has been put to a formal vote, and the office has not asked for one.

A lesser controversy concerns the hour at which the leger's day is considered to close. The office observes the close at the third bell of the Bell, as recorded in Spiral 9. Entries received after that hour are dated to the following day and initialled in green. No auditor has been able to determine when the green practice began.