The Seventh Spire

The Seventh Spire is the seventh of the architectural spires above the Vellum Level and the location in which The Seventh Chime is recorded. It rises 214 cubits from the landing of Stairwell 7-North, is twelve-sided below the eleventh gallery and eight-sided above it, and contains forty-one named galleries, three of which are named twice. The Spire is chiefly known for three things: the ringing of the Chime, the tenancy of the Seventh Spiral Administrative Spire on its seventh floor, and the protracted dispute over what its lower storeys contain.

It should not be confused with the Seventh Spiral Administrative Spire, which stands within it, nor with Spire 44, which the Spiral oversees, nor with the Spire 7 of the Lower Refectory Stacks, a food-service annexe of no architectural relation. The confusion is common. It has been litigated.

Structure and known galleries

The Spire is entered by four doors, of which two open. The Ground Ring holds the Porter's Ledger and the ballot box for the Order of the Undetermined Floor. The third gallery holds the Chime itself and is closed to perambulation during ringing hours, which are posted on the second gallery door and were last revised under the Fourth Concordance, Annex 9. The seventh floor is given over entirely to the Administrative Spire's public counters. Above the eleventh gallery the building narrows; the galleries there are entered by ladder and are universally described in expedition inventories as "smaller than expected."

The ninth gallery contains the only known complete set of the Concordance Recensions of the Seventh Spire, bound in seven volumes, one of which is a duplicate with a different ending. The twelfth gallery was sealed in the winter of the year the Tower records as 1141 and has not been entered since; the Sealing of the Seventh Spiral is cited as authority for the closure, though the Sealing itself concerns the Spiral and not the Spire, a distinction the Pragmatists of the Seventh Spiral have raised eleven times and lost eleven times.

"The Spire is a building. The Spiral is an administration. A thing may be inside a building without being the building, and the reverse is regrettably also true."

— Commentaries on the Seventh Concordance, Book II, gloss on the term "premises"

The Chime and the recording

The Seventh Chime is recorded in the Spire in the sense that its sound is taken down, not stored: two clerks of the Choral Spire attend at each ringing and write the interval and duration into a ledger before the tone has entirely faded. They work quickly. A ringing incomplete at the moment of writing is entered as "unfinished" and counted at half value in the annual tally. This practice was challenged by the Composer Selene of the Seventh Spire, who argued in her Petition on the Fading of Tones that the Chime cannot be recorded because it is gone before the pen descends. The petition was referred to the Administrative Spire and has not been answered; the clerks continue to write.

Ringing is prohibited between the hours of Compline and the first bell of the morning, except by the Porter, who has rung it once.

The dispute of the lower storeys

What the Spire rests on has been in question since at least the year 987. The Third Concordance states plainly, at clause 12, that "the Seventh Spire is founded upon the Seventh Spire," a formulation the Fifth Concordance later called a scribal error and corrected to read "founded upon the seventh landing." The Fifth Concordance was itself amended in a recension that restored the original wording and appended a note reading, in full: "The landing is the Spire considered from beneath."

Three positions have hardened. The Foundationists, led for forty years by the surveyor Halvard of the Ninth Plumb, hold that the Spire stands on masonry and that expeditions beneath it have merely not gone far enough. The Recursionists hold that it stands on itself and that the question of its base is therefore settled and should not be asked. The Pragmatists of the Seventh Spiral hold that it does not matter, since no one has ever needed the foundation for any administrative purpose, and have declined to fund a fourth descent.

Seventh Spire inquiry took evidence on the question in its third sitting, following the Incident of the Wandering Gallery, but its findings, though much quoted, address the gallery and not the foundation. A minority note by Librarian Ottoline Vess observes that the two questions were never separated at the hearing and doubts they can now be. Spire 404, Gallery of Partial Weaves is sometimes cited as a parallel case; the parallel is weak and the Spire's own record does not rely on it.

Historic incidents

In the year 1044 an Unscheduled Gallery appeared between the fourth and fifth floors and remained for nine days, during which it was entered by fourteen persons, catalogued, given the number 7-G-4a, and removed by the withdrawal of the number. The event is recorded as the Incident of the Wandering Gallery and prompted the inquiry named above. Librarian Ottoline Vess wrote in her minority note that the gallery "was not lost, and did not wander; it was simply where it had not been, which is a different failing."

A fire in 1198 consumed the fourth gallery's curtains and nothing else, the curtains having been treated against flame in the previous decade by order of the Seventh Spiral Administrative Spire at the insistence of a clerk named Perrin Ashgrove, whose repeated memoranda on the subject were, by his own account in the margin of one of them, "the only useful thing I have done in this office." The curtains are cited in the Commentaries on the Seventh Concordance as an instance of a precaution that succeeded and was therefore never recorded as a precaution.

Access and maintenance

The Spire is open to holders of a reading mark from the Vellum Amp Ink Conservatory Administrative Spire and to pilgrims of the Order of the Undetermined Floor on the third day of each month. Boots are removed at the Ground Ring and carried. Ladders above the eleventh gallery are inspected each quarter by the Plumb Office; the last inspection, in the year 1290, replaced two rungs and noted that the eighth gallery's hatch "closes but does not latch, and has not for some time."

Visitors are asked not to count the galleries aloud.