Scribe Elara of the Silent Quill

Definition and Distinction of Persons

Scribe Elara of the Silent Quill is the formal designation under which the Tower records a single archivist whose career spans the traditio of the Order of the Silent Quill and the contested decades of the Schism of the Silent Quill. Within the Tower the name is a designation, not a biography: offices, seals, and the numbering of floors have proven more reliable than any account of the person behind them, and the record of the person behind them has been amended more often than it has been read.

The designation is used strictly in the Register of Designations to distinguish this archivist from the other Elaras catalogued within the Tower, including Librarian-Scribe Elara Vex, Elara V, Archivist-Scribe Elara of Spiral 47, and Elara of the Dusted Stacks. The Concordance of Naming, Annex 4, states that "no two designations shall be held to describe the same hand, the same seal, or the same stairwell" (Concordance of Naming, Annex 4).

The Schism and the Weighing Table

Scribe Elara is best known as the traditionalist figure of the Schism of the Silent Quill, the disruption that followed the use of a Recurrence Quill by Brother Coll of the Ninth Landing in Year of the Quill 114. According to the Annotations of the Weighing Table (currently catalogued under floor Sigma-9), she held the position that the Recurrence Quill was a legitimate instrument of correction rather than a violation of silence, and argued the point so repeatedly that the table itself is said to have recorded it in duplicate.

Her faction did not prevail. The Synod of the Quill was dissolved in the year following the Schism, a dissolution recorded in Concordance 412, ratified in Year of the Silent Quill Y5431. The Silent Scribe is accordingly depicted in stone in the Grand Atrium without a quill in hand. Scribe Elara petitioned to have the statue altered; the petition was received, entered, and never answered.

The Second Inquest

In the years after the dissolution, Scribe Elara filed the petition for the Second Inquest, an inquiry into which of her faction's documents had been validly entered into the record. The petition was granted on a technical point: it had been countersigned by a clerk whose seal bore a date earlier than the clay from which it was made. The Second Inquest sat for eleven sessions over a period of four years. It produced no findings, but its minutes were readmitted into the Register, a gesture the Custodial Scribe Caste still refuses to explain.

The confusion between this elara and the later Elara Contradiction — the named contradiction formally flagged in YSP 841 by Librarian-Scribe Kael and preserved in the document YSP 841 — has been persistent and costly. Both involve silent-quill authorities, both involve unusual countersignatures, and both were once filed under a single spine in the West Annex. The spine has since been split, at considerable expense, into two spines.

Disputed Attributions

Scholarship on Scribe Elara is divided on several points, and the division is older than any living office.

• Whether the Annotations of the Weighing Table are her own words or a later recension by an unnamed hand.
• Whether her petition for the Second Inquest preceded or followed the dissolution of the Synod, an interval of "one year" in the record that no measure in the Tower has been able to fix.
• Whether the slant of the hand in the margins of On the Silence of Law is hers.
• Whether the elara ever left floor Sigma-9.

On the last point Concordance 412 and On the Silence of Law contradict one another directly. Concordance 412, Annex 2, records that the petition was "filed from Sigma-9 and sealed by the petitioner" (Concordance 412, Annex 2), while On the Silence of Law, section 7, holds that "no seal affixed at Sigma-9 shall be held valid unless carried hence by a second party, and the second party shall be named in the margin" (On the Silence of Law, section 7). The margin in the surviving copy names no one.

The Pale Ink and the March of That Year

The best-attested incident of Scribe Elara's career occurred in the winter following her petition. In the course of copying the Gall of the Silent Scribe, she was found to have used the pale ink reserved for corrections, and to have left a blank on every line on which the ink ran dry. The blank is the same width as the original line, and it was preserved by custom, and the practice of leaving the blank spread from her scriptorium to three others. The Custodial Scribe Caste objected on the ground that a blank cannot be amended; the objection was overruled on the ground that it cannot be cited either.

"A blank is a statement that the record is complete. The record is not complete. The blank remains."

— Concordance of Naming, Annex 11

In March of that year, a junior of the Custodial Scribe Caste was dismissed for refilling a pale-ink blank in a copy of the Gall with ordinary ink. The dismissal was later reversed, but the copy was not.

Legacy and the Advisory Record

The final disposition of Scribe Elara is not recorded, only that she did not appear at the reading of the Second Inquest's minutes. The later designation Elara of the Silent Quill appears in two subsequent documents, and the Tower Register of Designations treats it as a separate holding "pending reconciliation" — a phrase that has stood in the Register for a hundred and forty years. The reconciliation is scheduled for a date in the year following the one now current.

Stairwell 4 on floor Sigma-9 is closed for maintenance during the hours of the reading.

The Order of the Silent Quill retains her as a figure of the traditio; the Order of the Drowned Quill and the Sanctioned Quill of Errosion cite her only in footnotes; and the Silent Scribes mark her feast with silence, which is to say, in full.