Stairwell of Minor Regrets

The Stairwell of Minor Regrets is a descending stair of twenty-two risers on Floor 618, connecting the Vestibule of Deferred Apologies to the Alcove of Things Left Unsaid. It is the only structure in the Tower whose architecture is held to be responsive to the intentions of those who use it, and consequently the only stairwell with a standing observation post rather than a maintenance schedule. It is not to be confused with the Backwards Stairwell, with which it shares a landing on the north side and a long and unresolved administrative quarrel.

Construction and behavior

The stair was cut in AT 1141 from the same grey limestone as the vestibule above it, at a tread depth of 28 centimetres — three centimetres shallower than the standard set out in Concordance 61, Annex 2. The departure from standard is recorded in the Stairwell Calibration Ordinance as a deliberate concession to what the masons' petition called "the necessary brevity of the apology." Users report that the twenty-two risers pass more quickly than their number permits, and that a descent begun in hesitation is frequently concluded in resolve by the seventeenth riser.

Senior Lumener Alban of the Ninth Course examined the stair in AT 1162 and declined to attribute the effect to any vacancy in the stone, writing that the stair "regrets nothing itself, and is merely obliging" (Marginalia on On the Sympathetic Silence of Load-Bearing Absences, Note 14). The Scriptorium of Minor Weights has nonetheless logged the stair's behavior under Weight Class III: Obliging Structures, where it has remained for three hundred and forty years without reclassification, despite four petitions to move it to Class II.

The observation post

Since AT 1188 a Junior Lumener has been stationed at the head of the stair during daylight hours, tasked with recording descents that terminate before the eleventh riser. Such descents — called turnings in the post's daily log — are counted, not investigated. The log for the winter of AT 1204 records forty-one turnings in a single week, all of them by the same two clerks, neither of whom was named. The post's clerk at the time, Hesper Vane, appended a note to that week's page observing that one of the two had left a glove on the sixth riser and collected it the following morning, and that she had counted the descent as completed on the grounds that the intention had been resumed. Her ruling was never overturned and is cited in the training of observers to this day.

Custody and the relic

Custody of the stair belongs to the Custody of Minor Residues, which holds it under a standing permission issued for Minor Pilgrimages and renewed each decade since AT 1153. The Custody permits parties of no more than nine to descend together, on the reasoning that a tenth person overhears and obliges the descent to be repeated. Parties of ten have on three recorded occasions refused to disperse, and in AT 1287 a party of eleven was escorted from the upper landing by two Custodians who had themselves descended the stair four times in the course of the removal.

The sixth riser retains a shallow depression, 4 millimetres deep, worn by pilgrims who pause there. The Custody has declined to fill it on eleven separate occasions, most recently in AT 1444, on the ground that the depression is itself the object of the pilgrimage and that a level riser would leave the faithful with nothing to touch.

"We do not repair what is being regretted upon."

— Custody of Minor Residues, Return of Works, AT 1444, item 6

Disputed identification

A minority reading, advanced by Archivist Perrin Holt in AT 1398 and never formally withdrawn, holds that the Stairwell of Minor Regrets is a recension of the Backwards Stairwell and that the two should be entered under a single heading. Holt observed that descent from the vestibule produces in the user a sensation of having already descended, which he took to be the defining characteristic of the backwards type. The Synod of Minor Archivists rejected the argument in AT 1401 by a majority of three, noting that the Backwards Stairwell ascends while appearing to descend, whereas the Stairwell of Minor Regrets descends and appears to descend, and that the resemblance is therefore one of mood rather than of structure.

The dispute has not entirely closed. Concordance 203, which governs the classification of reversed structures, was amended in AT 1432 to include "stairwells of ambiguous direction," a category no office has yet agreed to administer. The Scriptorium has twice written to the Synod asking which of them is to be counted a reversed structure for the purposes of the amendment; the Synod has twice replied that the question is one for the Scriptorium. The stair itself remains where it was cut.

Visitor rules

Pilgrims are asked to descend in silence, to carry no open flame, and to remove their left glove before the first riser. The alcove below is closed on the ninth of every month for cleaning.