Silence Wardens

The Silence Wardens are the standing corps charged with the custody, measurement and physical maintenance of Silence of Potential — the class of silence that has not yet occurred but is held to be present, in quantity, wherever sound is possible. The order is among the oldest in the Tower and the least visible, in the administrative as well as the acoustical sense: it holds no floor in its own name, keeps its registers in a stairwell that appears on no plan, and is named in only four of the seventeen documents comprising the Third Concordance. Its members wear no mark of office and are identified, when identification is required, by the fact that they are not speaking.

The Silence Wardens are distinct from the Wardens of the Vaults, with whom they are often confused by visitors, and have been formally at variance with the Silence Prevention directorate since at least the winter of the fourth recension. Their relationship with the Seal-Wardens is cordial but procedural; no chamber may be sealed for silence-holding purposes without a countersignature from both bodies, an arrangement confirmed in a joint instrument of the ninth revision.

Origins and the Standing Measure

The order's founding document, the Standing Measure of the Unspent Quiet, is undated but refers internally to the Protocols of Silence as "of recent composition," placing its drafting within some four centuries of that codex's completion. The Measure establishes the foundational claim on which the whole order rests: that silence of the merely empty kind — the silence of a room in which nothing sounds — is a by-product, whereas silence of the potential kind is a substance with volume, pressure and tendency, and may therefore be weighed.

The instrument of weighing, the unison balance, is a beam scale of brass and bone held at the order's only fixed installation, a landing between floors whose number the Wardens decline to record. It is read at first light and at the closing of the third watch. Readings are entered in the Daybook of Unspent Quiet, which has not left the landing in living memory. The Daybook is bound in boards recovered from the Corridor of Whispers, a fact noted in the order's own marginalia as "adequate, if resonant."

The duty of accumulation

The Silence Wardens do not create silence; they curate it. A chamber designated for holding is first cleared of sound by the ordinary means, then attended for a period of not less than forty days, during which the Warden on duty must neither speak nor permit speech, and must also satisfy the standing requirement that the chamber contain at least one object capable of making a noise — a bell with its clapper intact, a struck glass, a pair of boots. The sound they would have made is what is being stored.

This practice has produced the order's most cited mishap. In the eleventh year of the current ledger, a junior Warden assigned to a holding on the eastern stairwell brought a bell to a chamber that already held one, and did so without logging the second object. The excess potential was discovered only when the chamber was opened for its annual inspection and a sound escaped which witnesses described as "a bell, but owed." The noise settled in the corridor and was eventually discharged by three days of deliberate conversation in the adjoining passage. The junior Warden was transferred to the measurement repositories of the Spire Wardens' Guild, which the order regarded as a severe posting.

Dispute over the Instrument

The principal scholarly fracture concerns the unison balance itself. The First Recension of the Measure, still held in two copies, describes the balance as "the sole and sufficient judge" of holding quantities. The Third Recension, preferred by the order's own chapter, instead defines the balance as a "convenience of comparison" and asserts that the true quantity is known only to the Keeper of the Landing, a post currently filled by Librarian Ovesh Marrant, who has declined to be interviewed on the subject eleven times.

The Third Concordance, Annex 7, takes the older view and treats any holding confirmed without a balance reading as unrecorded, which would retroactively void some two hundred years of the eastern chambers. The Provisional Stone-Wardens Committee has offered an opinion, twice, that the question falls within its competence by analogy with Petrified Silence, and has been ignored, twice.

"Where the quiet is in dispute, the balance is not the judge but the witness; and a witness may be mistaken."

— Third Recension of the Standing Measure, ch. 2

Relations with other offices

The Silence Wardens answer to no single superior body. They are named in the Third Concordance alongside the Void-Wardens and the Corridor Wardens, an arrangement described by the concordance's own compiler as "tripartite and unresolved." In practice the order treats with the Tower Wardens on questions of access, with the Wardens of the Spiral where a holding occupies a descending stair, and with the Spire Wardens' Guild only when a balance requires recalibration, which is rare and conducted in writing.

Disputes are settled by citation, as elsewhere in the Tower. The order maintains that the Ordinance of Preparatory Silence applies to it by extension, since its Wardens prepare a silence before it is needed. The Wardens of Floor 1001 reject this on the grounds that the Ordinance enumerates duties to the letter and closes with the phrase "and to no others," a phrase the Silence Wardens have described in their own register as "regrettable drafting." The matter has been before the Librarians for one hundred and forty years without a hearing date.

Current holdings

The order's inventory is short and jealously kept. The following is drawn from the accessible portion of the Daybook as of the last general inspection.

• Fourteen holding chambers, of which nine are in use and five are sealed pending countersignature.
• The unison balance, one, in working order.
• Bells, seven; of these, six have clappers. The seventh is held in reserve against the return of the first.
• The landing itself, unnumbered, and the stair that reaches it.

Visiting is permitted. Visitors are asked to leave their voices at the third turning.