The Sconce

The Sconce is the name given both to Floor 1,337 of the Tower and, by extension, to the irregular jurisdiction that surrounds the Wickery housed there. It is the only floor in the archive whose name is in general use while its number is in dispute, and it is the only floor on which the maintenance of a single class of object — the Luminous Sconce Non Corrosive — has been elevated, by successive recensions, into a question of governance.

The Sconce is not a room. It is a precinct of vaulted galleries, service shafts, and lamp-annexing chambers occupying an extent that no survey has fixed since the Census of Shadows was abandoned in the eleventh year of its circulation. Visitors are advised that the floor is entered from the north stairwell and left by the same stairwell; the eastern doors open onto further galleries of the Sconce and are not exits.

Name and number

The designation "The Sconce" is recorded in the Third Concordance, Annex 4, which fixes the Wickery permanently on Floor 1,337 and describes the floor beneath it as "that precinct wherein the Standard Tower Lumen is held at grade." The name predates the number by an interval the Librarians have never settled; the earliest entry in the floor-register gives a name and a blank space, and the blank was filled in later by a hand that has not been identified.

Floor 1,337 is irregular. Nothing above it or below it in the catalogue is numbered in a way that permits reconstruction, and the proximity of Arclight Sconces holdings at 1,338 and 1,341 has tempted more than one archivist to suppose a sequence where none exists. The Concordant Law governing floor-designation holds that a number once entered is not a claim about position but a claim about jurisdiction, and on that reading 1,337 is not where the Sconce is but what the Sconce administers.

The Wickery and the Union

The Wickery is the working heart of the floor: the trimming, drawing, and annealing halls from which the Tower's certified light-sources are issued. Its permanent staff belong to the Fraternity of Illumination and Sconce Maintenance, Grade V, commonly called the Lamplighters Union, whose headquarters have stood on Floor 1,337 since the Fraternity's charter was confirmed there. The Lamplighters Union is responsible under the Tenth Concordance for holding Procedural Grade spaces at their specified luminosity, and the Sconce is the floor on which that responsibility is most often examined.

The relationship between the Wickery and the Union is not one of employer and employed. The Wickery is a place; the Union is a body; the Fraternity holds the maintenance, and the Wickery holds the lamps. Clerks who confuse the two are corrected by reference to the Second Stairwell Recension, which removed the stairwells from the Fraternity's jurisdiction and left the halls to the Wickery alone.

Incident of the winter of 1,337

In the winter following the floor's renumbering, a fault in the annealing galleries produced three hundred Luminous Sconces Non Corrosive whose luminosity would not hold grade. The condition — Luminous Nimbus — is treated elsewhere, but its origin is recorded here. The floor's lamps dimmed in the same hour each evening for nine evenings, and the Wickery's overseer, Aethelred Spiral, refused to relight them on the grounds that the fault was in the glass and not the wick.

The dispute was referred to the Third Concordance and settled by an amendment to the Tenth Concordance that no one now reads in full. Its effect was to grant the Fraternity authority over the annealing halls during any dimming recurrence, an authority the Fraternity has never exercised and has never surrendered. Aethelred's Silence — the overseer's refusal to testify before the inquiry — is cited in later recensions as precedent for the proposition that a maintenance officer may decline to explain a maintenance decision provided the lamps are afterwards found to be lit.

The Stilled Light dispute

The Sconce's distinctive contribution to the archive is the Attenuated Lumen-Sconce, a fixture of cultivated lumen-moss whose investigative beam may be drawn down to a specified gradient without collapsing into obscurity. The lamps of the Sconce are held to this standard; the Attenuated Lumen-Sconces of the upper galleries are held to it more strictly still, and the Type-VII Attenuated Lumen-Sconce is the apparatus by which Stilled Light is achieved in the Wickery's inner chambers.

Scholars disagree about the floor's relation to that apparatus. The Third Concordance treats the Sconce as a place where attenuated light is maintained; the Tenth Concordance, in an annex that contradicts it, treats the Sconce as the condition of attenuation itself, "a state of the lamp and not a hall." The Concordant Law commentary of Aethelred Spiral supports the first reading; the later recension of Aethelred's Silence supports the second. No Librarian has ruled between them, and the floor is presently catalogued under both headings.

Access and notes

Admission to the galleries is granted on production of a floor-certificate countersigned by the Wickery. The certificate does not state a duration, and holders are reminded that the Sconce is not a destination but a station: the north stairwell continues in both directions, and no expedition has reported reaching either end of it.

Lamps carried onto the floor by visitors must be extinguished at the threshold and left with the attendant. The rule is old, is posted at the north door, and is enforced.