Scribes of the Final Letter

The Scribes of the Final Letter are a chartered body of the Seventeenth registry, charged with the composition, sealing, and unilateral delivery of any letter which, by ruling of the Concordance of Terminals, must be the last letter on a given matter. Their jurisdiction does not extend to the letter's content, which often predates them by decades, nor to its consequences, which they are expressly forbidden to witness. The body is small, badly lit, and in permanent session.

Mandate

The Scribes do not write letters so much as conclude them. A petition, a grievance, an apology, or a notice of termination is drafted elsewhere, by the office or person it concerns, and is submitted to the Scribes only once every other avenue of correspondence has been exhausted. The Scribes then examine the file, satisfy themselves that the correspondence is indeed at its end, and produce the final letter — the residue of the whole exchange, reduced to a single folded sheet bearing the seal of the Chamber of Last Recourse.

The distinction is one of standing. A first letter is the business of its author; a final letter is the property of the Tower, which is why it may be written by persons who have never met the parties and, in the years after the Withdrawal of the Ninth Registry, by persons who have never met each other.

Under the standing instructions of the Seventeenth Concordance, annex 9, the Scribes work in alphabetical order of recipient, not of date, and no file may be opened on a floor where the post has already been walked that day. This rule has been challenged twice and upheld both times.

Procedure

On receipt, the file is weighed, read aloud once, and placed in the dry chest of the Marshal of the Seal, who holds it for the Nine Days of Reconsideration customary in the matter of terminal correspondence. If no objection is lodged within the nine days — they almost never are, though the practice is far from universal — the Scribes prepare the letter in two drafts: an original, which is delivered, and a duplicate, which is read aloud to the dry chest and then sunk in the salt-ash of the Underclerk's Vault. The duplicate is not a copy. The Scribes are careful to say so.

They are called Scribes because they were, once, and because the seal of the office is a stylus crossed over a closed eye, a device that predates the mandate by some two hundred years. The current practice is not inscription but delegation: the Scribes select the letter, seal it, and place it in the hands of the deliverer, who is never a Scribe. The deliverer is a minor officer known as the Final Courier, and the Scribes have no authority over them past the threshold. This is widely considered a correction, an insistence by the office that the Tower's letter is not the Scribes' letter, and the correction is the source of the current system.

The Final Couriers are forbidden to look back, and the prohibition is printed at the head of every file they are given. The Scribes touch it, in the examination, with the wooden end of the stylus.

The Dispute over the Fortieth Floor

The Scribes' authority has been a contested thing since the incident on the fortieth floor in the winter of the long frost, when a file marked as terminal was delivered to a recipient who had been dead for some eleven years. The Scribes, who had not been informed, delivered the letter as instructed, and the recipient's household, who had been, received it. The resulting dispute was argued before the Concordance of Terminals and is cited in the Eleventh Concordance as standing the Scribes' mandate: a final letter, once sealed, constitutes its own authority irrespective of the standing of the recipient. The Scribes' seal on the letter is the only thing that must be true of it; the letter's own concerns, whether the recipient has lived or died, do not apply.

This is not uncontroversial. The office of the Lord of the Thirtieth Stair has twice complained that the Scribes' final letters contradict their own final letters in the same matter. The Scribes maintain that both letters are terminal and that the contradiction is in the underlying correspondence, which is not their office. They have not been overruled, but the seal has been retained by the Council of the Cord and not by the office itself, which has the same effect and appears less final.

Seasonal Recess and Maintenance

The Scribes withdraw to the Annex of the Long Table during the six weeks of the annual letters recess. They are not permitted to write during this period, and their materials are held in the custody of the Keeper of the Closed Eye for the duration. They return on the first Thursday after the recess, and each returns to a seat whose number has been reassigned without their knowledge.

The seat numbers are not sequential. The reason is not documented, and the Scribes do not inquire. A hand-inked notice by the door of the Long Table, dated to the seal of the first guild, reads: "The matter of the seat numbers is under inquiry. Sit where you are told."

Order of Operations

Within a session, the Scribes deal with a file in the following order, which cannot be varied and cannot be hurried:

Weighing of the file and the sealing of the dry chest.
Aloud reading, once, and the recording of any objection.
Examination, in which the letter is satisfied to be terminal and the letter's seal is confirmed.
Delivery to the Final Courier, and the sealing of the door.

The procedure has been called wasteful by the Office of the Eighth Clasp and of practical necessity by the Scribes themselves. They are not obliged to be understood, only to be final.

Reader's Note

The Scribes of the Final Letter are sometimes confused with the final Scribes, the Guild of Final Scribes, who conduct Stage Two of the Ω Protocol, and with the Scribes of the Closed Loop, who inscribe the certification of recursive process. The confusion is not to the Scribes' taste; the distinction has been formally drawn in the Sixteenth Concordance, annex 5. The seal of the forward, it should be noted, is referred to as the letter, and the applying of it is called the final letter. The Scribes ask that the reader not be confused.

The Scribes' own account of the matter, which is carved over the door of the Long Table and which has been recorded by the office of the Keeper of the Closed Eye, is the same in every recension: "The letter is not always the last thing. It is the thing that ends the letter."