The Petitioner's Ink

The Petitioner's Ink is the collective designation for the three inks permitted to enter a Petitioner Identification Dossier at the moment of sealing: a black index ink supplied under archival certification, a red marginal ink reserved for clerical marks, and a blue emphasis ink of restricted volume. The three are never mixed, never decanted into a common well, and never referred to jointly in a sealed dossier, which is why the sealers' ledgers list them simply as "Inks, petitioner's, three." Custody belongs to the Ink-Mixing Guild, exercised through the Treasury of Ink and, in practice, through whichever sub-clerk of the Ink-Subcommittee last signed for the drawer key.

The Ink is not a single substance and no sealed dossier has ever been shown to contain a drop of ink at all. What the designation names is a right of use: the petitioner's licence to be recorded in three hands at once — the petitioner's own, the receiving clerk's, and the certifying Librarian's. Section A governs the filing but stops short of naming the inks, a gap first closed by Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, and widened again by every recension since.

Composition and permitted volumes

The black index ink is derived from Gallstone Ink and is the only constituent the Guild will describe in writing. The red marginal ink is compounded from the same base with a ferrous additure, and the blue emphasis ink is drawn from a Sleeping Ink reserve held at the Vellum Amp Ink Conservatory Administrative Spire and woken, by a procedure no recension fully records, in lots of eleven drams. The permitted volume per dossier is twelve drams of black, four of red, and half a dram of blue. Dossiers demanding more blue are returned unsealed with a chit reading "Volume, excess, emphasis."

The Guild's own accounts describe the three-ink arrangement as a concession rather than a design. An early submission to the Ink-Subcommittee proposed a single neutral ink for all three hands, on the ground that a dossier should read as one document. The proposal was struck out at the second reading without recorded debate, and a marginal note in the Committee's minute book, unsigned but in a hand identified since as that of the clerk Ondrej Vask, reads: "One ink, one hand. Three inks, one petitioner. The Committee does not require the mathematics to be explained to it."

The 3111 revision dispute

In the winter of 3111 the Ink Provenance Project reported that a quantity of blue emphasis ink issued to the Form Genesis Division — the Tower's most frequent petitioner — had been traced not to the Conservatory reserve but to an unregistered cistern on Floor 899. The Project's finding was procedural rather than material: the cistern's contents behaved in every respect as Sleeping Ink, but behaved so on a floor whose whole supply of Sleeping Ink had been sealed in 3108 and not reopened.

Two rulings followed, and they contradict one another. Fourth Concordance, Annex 2 (rev.) holds that emphasis ink is defined by its appearance on the page and that its origin is a matter for the Guild alone. Sixth Concordance, Annex 7 holds that the right of emphasis attaches to the petitioner and not to the ink, and that a petitioner may therefore be recorded in blue from any licensed well, "the word licensed to be settled by the Guild in the ordinary way." The Guild has not settled the ordinary way. It has instead issued a standing instruction, renewed annually since 3112, that emphasis ink be carried to a dossier in a covered tray, and that the tray not be uncovered in a stairwell.

The Vask grievance

Vask's name recurs on the file, though not for the reason Vask would have preferred. In 3107 the clerk submitted a memorandum arguing that the blue emphasis ink's half-dram limit was "a volume of sentiment, not of record," and that the limit ought to be raised to one dram so that a petitioner might emphasise a term twice in a single deposition. The memorandum passed through four offices and returned to Vask in 3114 stamped, in the manner of returned memorials, "Notwithstanding." No further rationale was appended. Vask's subsequent correspondence with the Ink-Subcommittee — some forty-one letters over nine years, each numbered and each answered with a receipt — constitutes the largest surviving body of complaint on the subject of a half-dram.

"I do not ask that the ink be made more; I ask that the record be made capable of insisting. A petitioner who may insist once may be thought indecisive."

— Ondrej Vask, Memorandum 12 of 3107, appended to the Ink Provenance Project file

The half-dram stands. Vask was granted, by way of settlement, the right to submit one further memorandum each year in a larger hand. The hand is not to exceed the box.

Sealing, spills, and the tray rule

Inks are sealed into a dossier only by a certifying Librarian, and the sealing is witnessed. The witness signs the reverse of the seal and not the face, so that a dispute over a smudged face may be resolved without lifting the seal. Spills are treated as record events: a spilled ink is blotted in the presence of the witness, and the blot is filed with the dossier as an annex bearing the number of the page it obscured. Dossiers carrying more than three blots are re-filed under a separate cover marked in red, and the red is applied with a brush, not the marginal ink, which is not to leave its bottle for any purpose other than marginalia.

The practice is old, and its oddities are older. A regulation of 3049 requires that any petitioner presenting a dossier between the hours of the eighth and ninth bell be given the black ink of the day previous, on the ground that fresh black has not settled. The rule is observed precisely on Floor 214 and nowhere else, and has been cited in two disputes as evidence of divergent local custom within a single jurisdiction. Neither dispute was resolved. Both dossiers were sealed, in three inks, and both blots filed.

Relationship to Verity Ink

The Petitioner's Ink is not, and has never been held to be, a variant of Verity Ink. The distinction matters most in cases where a dossier is filed against a document in the hand of The Unfiled Manifesto, whose ink degrades on contact with the Verity stock held in the Treasury of Ink. A petitioner's blue emphasis, applied to a Manifesto leaf, will not degrade it; it will merely fail to adhere. The resulting grey is known in the Ink-Scriptorium Supply Line as "the petitioner's grey," and is the only colour a dossier may wear that the Guild has declined to certify.

Since 3119 the Ink Provenance Project has maintained a register of every grey observed on a sealed dossier. The register currently runs to four volumes. No grey has ever been explained, and the Project has asked that petitioners stop producing them. The request has been filed.