Stairwrighting

Stairwrighting is the craft and regulated practice of cutting, setting, and certifying the stairs of the Tower, together with the associated trade of enclosing them. It is distinguished from Aperture Weaving — the installation of doorways, hatches, and other openings — although no regulation of the Tower has ever succeeded in separating the two in practice. The Guild of Stairwrights and Aperture Weavers administers both, under licence granted by the Concordance of Trades, Second Recension and amended, at the last count, forty-one times.

Stairwrights hold that a flight of stairs is not a structure but a relationship: between the floor above, the floor below, and the person who must be persuaded to travel between them. The Guild's founding maxim, cut into the lintel of its first chapter house on floor 2,204, states this without ornament: one rise, one tread, one witness.

Scope and method

A stairwright's work begins at survey and ends at certification, though the intervals between these are governed by schedules that few stairwrights can recite and none may ignore. Survey establishes the rise and tread of each step, the pitch of the flight, the number of landings, and the number of steps from which a traveller may see the floor they departed. The last figure is recorded separately and is not disclosed to the traveller.

Setting follows survey. Until the reforms of Librarian Ottiline Marrow in the years immediately preceding the Aperture Cycle, steps were cut in situ, which required a stairwright to stand on the step below the one being worked and produced a characteristic stoop still visible in the older guild portraits. Marrow's reform permitted pre-cutting to a survey schedule, and stairwrighting thereafter divided into the yard trade and the fitting trade. Relations between the two have never been cordial.

The rise-and-tread dispute

The central technical controversy of the trade concerns the ratio of rise to tread. The Third Concordance, Annex 4, fixes the standard at one part rise to two parts tread, and forbids variation. The Concordance of Trades, Second Recension fixes no ratio at all, holding that a stair should be "suited to its floor, and its floor to its stair, and the whole to no general rule whatsoever" (Second Recension, preamble to Part III).

Both documents are in force. Stairwrights resolve the contradiction by cutting to Annex 4 and certifying to Part III, a practice first recorded on floor 868 in the winter of 339 and known since as double reckoning. A stair cut to Annex 4 but certified to Part III is described in guild returns as compliant on both counts. The phrase has survived three attempts to abolish it.

"Where two Concordances speak, the stairwright hears both, and cuts once."

— Ardis Vole, Marginalia on the Trades, entry 112

Detractors note that the stair is nonetheless only cut once, and that hearing both has never once altered a dimension.

Certification and the Non-Interference question

All completed flights are certified before use. Certification attests that the stair is fit for travel, that it does not arrive at a floor other than the one named in its schedule, and that its handrail, if any, is continuous. Handrails are optional; continuity, where a handrail exists, is not.

The Certification of Non-Interference was extended to stairwrighting by the Chapter of Continuous Handrail in 606, on the argument that a certified stair must not influence the floors it connects. This produced an immediate difficulty: a stair that connects two floors is, in the plain sense, the sole means by which either influences the other. The Chapter's ruling held that influence travels by the stair and not through it, a distinction upheld ever since and understood by no one. Certifying officers are required to affirm it aloud during inspection.

Acoustic obligations

Stairwrighting falls partly within the jurisdiction of the Acoustic Dampening Guild, whose members are entitled to attend any setting of a flight of more than thirty steps. The entitlement arises from the older principle that a stair announces its use, and that the announcement belongs to the acousticians rather than the stairwrights. Aperture 497.03.15 was the subject of the longest recorded dispute between the two guilds, lasting nineteen years, over whether the sound of a door opening onto a landing was made by the door or by the landing.

Stairwrights were not consulted in the matter and were required to alter the pitch of three steps to accommodate the eventual settlement.

Notable flights

The following flights are held in the Guild's register of works of special note:

• the Marrow Stair, floor 2,204, the first pre-cut flight and the last to be installed with its original surveyor present;
• the Silent Flight of 88, certified without acoustic attendance, and silent;
• the Long Ascent, whose step count has been recorded as 1,406 and as 1,407, and which is not open to revision;
• the Return Stair of Aperture 54-B, which arrives where it departs, and is certified for one-way travel only.

Current standing

The Guild of Stairwrights and Aperture Weavers numbered, at its last published return, one thousand and nine members, of whom four hundred are engaged in stairwrighting proper and the remainder in openings. The ratio has been stable for a century and is regarded by the Guild as evidence of sound governance.

Unfinished flights are common above floor 3,000, where survey schedules are issued more quickly than flights can be set. These are marked at their lowest step with a white chalk band and must not be climbed past the third step. The band is renewed each quarter by the floor's steward.