Sealing Chapel

The Sealing Chapel is a consecrated chamber, nominally subordinate to Aperture Management, in which the recitation of the Seventeen Sealing Verses is performed against a physical aperture rather than a documentary one. Chapels are not numbered with floors; they are designated by the aperture they serve, and a chapel that has lost its aperture retains the designation and is called widowed until reassignment. At the last survey there were nine chapels in service, four widowed, and one — Chapel of the Eleventh Requisition — whose status the survey declined to record on the grounds that the question had been referred upward twice already.

Construction and the Acoustic Requirement

A chapel is built to the aperture, not the reverse. The chamber is windowless, floored in Cobble-Grout to a depth of no less than nine inches, and finished so that a verse spoken at the threshold arrives at the far wall no louder than a hand rubbed once across a sleeve. This is not ornament. The Sealing rite fails audibly before it fails administratively: where a chapel echoes, the reciting clerk hears their own Verse 3 returned to them, mistakes it for a second voice, and stops. Stoppage voids the rite. The Initial Reverification of 2441 records eleven such failures in a single season, all in the east chapels, all attributed in the margin to the plasterer.

Concordance 117 does not mention chapels at all, and this omission is the source of most subsequent trouble. The ritual is authorized there for Contextual Sealing without any statement as to where contextual sealing is to be conducted, and the chapels have spent the intervening period arguing that the silence is permission.

The Recitation Order and the Substitution Dispute

Custom holds that Verses 1–3 are spoken facing the aperture and the remainder facing the recording table. The custom is unwritten. It is nonetheless enforced by the vergers, who will stop a clerk mid-line and begin again from the top, and who have the right under an unpaginated appendix of the 117 recension to do so without explanation.

A long disagreement divides the chapels on the substitution of congregational response. The Chapel of the Second Register maintains that the assembly may speak the responding clauses of Verses 13–17 in place of the lector, citing the practice at the Sealing of the Seventh Spiral, where the record notes a "great and various voice" without specifying its composition. The Chapel of the Salt Stair rejects this, holding that the record in question described the noise of a collapsing floor and that the two have been confused ever since. Neither chapel will receive the other's delegates. The Librarian Sennet Orr, asked to arbitrate in 3106, wrote that both readings were defensible and that he would be dead before he chose, a position subsequently adopted as precedent and never overturned.

"Where two chapels recite the Binding differently, let each be correct within its own walls, and let no clerk carry the one form into the other's porch."

— Aperture Management, Provisional Ruling 12, posted at the door of every chapel and legible in none of them

Vesting, and the Matter of the Tape

Clerks are vested in the chapel, not before it. The Sanctioned Yellow Tape is laid across the aperture by the verger and not by the reciting clerk, a division of labour established after an incident in the winter of 2988 in which a junior clerk taped and recited both, and the tape was found afterwards still sealed to his sleeve. Four verses of the Documentary Sealing were thereby deposited in the wrong place, and the aperture continued to admit air for nine days.

Chapels hold their own copies of the Seventeen Sealing Verses, bound at the Guild's expense and chained at the reading stand. Chained copies may not leave the chamber. A chapel whose copy is unaccounted for is closed until a replacement is consecrated, which takes a season, and the closure is recorded against the verger.

The Widowed Chapels

When an aperture is closed by Chamber Sealing the chapel does not close with it. It remains consecrated, unlit, and on the survey. Widowed chapels are used for storage of tape and for the rehearsal of clerks who have not yet recited in a live chamber; the rehearsal is acknowledged to be useless for the rite and valued chiefly because it keeps the vergers in practice.

Three of the four widowed chapels have been widowed since before the Initial Sealing was complete, and the record of their apertures is held in a different hand from the rest. The Chapel of the Ninth Recess has petitioned for reassignment in every year of record and received, in 3120, a letter confirming that its petition was properly filed.

Inventory of the Chapel of the Second Register

The following is transcribed from the door-board as it stood at the last inspection, with the annotation that the fourth entry has not been seen since 3133.

• One chained recension of the Verses, watermark of the Guild, unnumbered.
• Two vergers' staves, one split and retained for the split.
• One roll of Sanctioned Yellow Tape, less eleven feet.
• One brass reading lamp, removed for repair, not returned.
• Nine inches of Cobble-Grout at the threshold, relaid and level.

No clerk is to sweep a chapel. The grout is swept by the vergers on the first of the month, and the prohibition is posted beside the vesting hooks where it is read every morning and broken perhaps twice a year.