Stairwell Beta Landing 341-7

Stairwell Beta Landing 341-7 is a half-landing situated between the 341st and 342nd riser courses of Stairwell Beta, occupying the western side of that stairwell where its later aperture is not yet visible. It measures 2 metres 41 centimetres by 1 metre 06 centimetres, with a depth of 34 centimetres at the western rail rising to 41 centimetres at the wall. It is registered under Register entry 341-7 and is the only landing in Stairwell Beta to hold a standing entry in both the structural and the ceremonial rolls.

Designation and dispute

The landing's number is not, as is often assumed, an ordinal. It records a position: the seventh registered feature of the 341st riser course. This convention is set out in The Risers Concordance, Annex 3, though The Second Risers Concordance disputes it, holding that the terminal figure denotes a landing class rather than a sequence, and citing the absence of classes 1 through 6 anywhere in the stairwell as evidence that the seventh is meaningful and the others were never built. The dispute is not settled. Both documents remain sealed and both are cited in the landing's maintenance docket, sometimes on the same page.

Matters were not improved by the survey of Clerk Ansory Belt, who in the winter of the year recorded as the long enumeration measured the landing on three separate occasions and returned 2.41 m, 2.40 m, and 2.44 m. Belt attributed the divergence to the riser heights of Stairwell Beta, which are recorded elsewhere as varying between 17.2 and 19.8 centimetres and, in a competing survey, between 9 and 14 centimetres without pattern, cycle, or observable cause, and therefore concluded that no measurement of anything standing on those risers can be expected to agree with itself twice. Belt's memorandum is kept in the landing's own docket, which is itself kept on the landing, in a tin.

Function

Landing 341-7 serves as the formal turning point for ascent traffic bound for Spiral 117, Aperture Beta who do not hold a transfer token for the conduits of Stairwell Beta. Parties without a token are required to pause here for the duration of one full riser cycle and proceed no further until the tread beneath them has settled. The pause is not timed by any instrument; it is timed by the stair.

The landing also carries the Descent Imperative notice for the western branch, a bronze plate affixed in the year of The Ninth Recension and legible only from above. Readers approaching from below report the plate as blank. The Warden of Descent has declined to comment on this in writing, and the office's standing instruction is that the plate be read from the correct side or not at all.

"The landing is to be swept on the first riser cycle of each month, or on the first available cycle thereafter if the first has not settled. Sweeping is not to be attempted during the pause."

— The Maintenance Concordance, clause 88(b)

Use in Luminous Verdian

The damp northern corner of the landing hosts a colony of Chlorophota labyrinthus, one of several native to Stairwell Beta and the only one that has been successfully transplanted for use in Luminous Verdian. The colony is harvested under licence by the Guild of Lamplighters on the fourth cycle of each quarter; the licences are renewed more often than they are read, in keeping with the practice of The Concordances. The northern corner is not to be swept. Clause 88(b) is understood to except it, though the exception appears in no recension and is maintained entirely by custom.

Notable incidents

In the winter of Floor 8,881's third audit, a party of eleven ascending from Spiral Beta-4 halted on the landing for the required pause and remained there for nine days, the tread beneath them having settled into a configuration the party's eldest member described as "patient." The party was eventually retrieved by way of Ninth Stairwell Annex and did not reach Spiral 117, Aperture Beta at all. The incident occasioned The Fourth Pause Concordance, which fixed the duration of the pause at one riser cycle and defined a riser cycle, unhelpfully, as the period between a riser's settling and its next settling.

A second incident, in the same winter and possibly the same week, concerned Status Beta. The status board for the landing is mounted on the eastern wall and is changed by the Office of Ascending Records only when the landing's condition changes. It has read stable since the plate was affixed. A clerk of that office, Clerk Merid Vasp, filed The Complaint of the Eastern Wall in the following spring, arguing that a board that has never been changed cannot be said to be maintained, and requesting that it be altered once and restored, so that the record would show a hand had touched it. The request was granted. The board now reads stable, then stable, and the intervening alteration is preserved in an annexe at The 22.J Landing Atelier.

Access

Landing 341-7 is reached from below by 341 risers of Stairwell Beta and from above by one. It may also be reached by conduit from Spiral 44-beta, which requires a token, and from Thirteenth Vestibule in circumstances the Office of Ascending Records has never specified. Visitors are asked not to leave the tin open.