The Observance Mandate

The Observance Mandate is the standing instrument by which the Librarians bind a repeated practice to a class of observance and to the floors on which it may be performed. It is often confused with the Custodial Mandate and the Directorial Mandate, both of which descend from earlier instruments and neither of which has been fully read aloud since the sealing of the Nine Stair. The Observance Mandate was not drafted. It accumulated, chiefly between Floor 44 and Floor 61, and is now kept in the Registry of Instruments with a marginal apparatus exceeding its body text by nearly four to one.

Structure of the Instrument

The Mandate is bound in four parts. Part I establishes the categories of practice — the ten recognized classes, from the provisional α through the standing Class Γ-Prime and the shadow-observances below it. Part II fixes which of these classes each practice may be entered under. Part III, the longest section, records the floor registers in which observances are daily written and countersigned. Part IV, added in the winter of 1129, is the first part most readers consult: a list of things the Mandate does not do. It does not create precedence. It does not excuse the Reconciliation Hour. It does not, in its own words, "settle the question of the EquilibriumĠTide" (Observance Mandate, Part IV, para. 6).

Part IV is read once at each Silence Protocol, aloud, and thereafter not put to business. The Custodial Prefecture maintains that the reading was made mandatory by Part I; Part I contains no such requirement. The point is at issue in the clause dispute below.

The Clause 12.iv Dispute

Matters of the Mandate's authority are held by the Fourth Concordance, which is to say held by a document that was amended four times in the year the Mandate was bound, and once more in the same month to accommodate a table of floor numbers. The Mandate's Clause 12.iv assigns shadow-observances to Floor 44 and forbids their entry on any higher register. The Fourth Concordance, Clause 12.iv, by its own section numbering, assigns the shadow-observances to the register on Floor 61 and is silent on any floor below it.

Neither document acknowledges that the other numbers a clause 12.iv. The Doctrinal Variances Register records the discrepancy in three separate entries, each under a different heading, and expresses no view. The practical consequence, since the winter of 1129, is that a shadow observance of the Equilibrium Tide is performed on the 44th floor and recorded on the 61st, and a clerk making the return must write the same gesture twice and may not abbreviate either entry.

The Grievance of the 58th Floor

In the winter of 1144 the Mandate's floor registers, as amended, ceased to include the 58th floor. The omission was not deliberate; the 58th floor sits between two unnumbered floors whose names appear in the register out of order, and when the register was recopied, a reader's line of sight had run along the table's bottom edge. The fifth-floor clerk who recopied it, Adelard of Order 4, wrote a note on the binding: "No entry, no observance, and no authority to explain it."

Under the Mandate, an observance performed on a floor with no register entry is not void. It is, in the language of Clause 19, "practiced, and not counted." The 58th floor was therefore worked for forty-one years without any counting. When the floor was restored to the register in 1185, the accumulated entries of the intervening years were delivered to the Custodial Prefecture in a single sealed chest and were left unopened. The Prefecture has not ruled on them. The floor's steward, Anselm of the Register, has asked twice for a ruling and has been told twice, in writing, that the ruling is pending (Custodial Prefecture, return of 1186).

Relation to the Observance Manual

The Mandate does not govern the conduct of observances. That conduct, and its teaching, is governed by the Observance Manual, Recension C, which took over the Ingress Amp Isolation Practice from the older recension. The Manual is the practical counterpart to the Mandate's abstract: the Mandate classifies, the Manual instructs. The Manual's own preface notes, with patience, that the Mandate does not and cannot tell a clerk what to do with their hands. The Rite of Sequential Days is likewise an observance of the Manual and not of the Mandate, though the seven numbered days are numbered by the Mandate's register.

The Cataloguing Amp is not subject to the Mandate. Amps are governed by the Closure Amp Re Sealing and its own schedule, and the two instruments have never been reconciled.

Amendment and Recension

The Mandate has been amended at least eleven times and has three surviving recensions. The recension of 1102 is the only one with a complete table of contents. The recension of 1150 lacks the table and Part III. The third, undated, is the manuscript from which the whole archive is now read, and it is a copy with a colophon reading simply: "This is not the fourth recension" (Colophon, Mandate, fol. 211r). The Librarians have made no ruling on what a fourth recension would be.

When the Mandate is amended, the amendment is entered in Part I, which is the part read at each Silence Protocol, and the reading of the amendment is followed by the reading of the Manual of Processional Patience in full. The Custodians of Stairs have objected to this juxtaposition, on the grounds that the reading room is not large enough to seat the observers. The objection was recorded. It remains objected to.

The Mandate's central prohibition remains in force. It is not, as is often said, a prohibition on activity; the Mandate permits observance. It requires only that every observance be written, and that every writing be read aloud by an authorizing clerk, and that the authorizing clerk be the same person who performed the observance. The Mandate lists, at Clauses 34 to 36, the twenty-four offices that may not perform observances and the four offices that may perform but not write. The list is amended by striking through, not by erasure. A striking-through is legible and a correction is not; this is a matter of record-keeping, and the Librarians do not explain it further.