Third Scribe

The Third Scribe is the designation conferred on the officer responsible for the custody, correction, and eventual release of the master transcription from which all working copies of the First Concordance are derived. The office is not a rank but a post of record: the Third Scribe holds no authority to legislate and no seat on the Concordance benches, yet no amended text enters circulation without passing beneath their hand. Appointment is by the Keeper of the Twenty-Third Spire, whose countersignature appears on the instrument of investiture in the absence of any surviving form of seniority. The post has been continuously occupied since before the Third Concordance was sealed, though the roll of holders is defective for the interval 4,144–4,150 by the Tower's own reckoning.

The office and its instruments

The Third Scribe works from a suite on the eleventh terrace, whose fittings are enumerated in the inventory of the Custodial Scribe Caste: one copying desk of seasoned blackwood, one Scribe's Glass for the detection of ligature drift, a locked press for the seal of contingent correction, and a stool. The stool is listed twice in some recensions, and one auditor noted that a stool cannot be in two places; the discrepancy has been referred to the School of the Unnamed Scribe and remains open.

The office's central instrument is the seal of contingent correction, which permits the Third Scribe to alter a transcription before release provided the alteration is logged, witnessed, and later either ratified or struck by the Scribe-Confessor's Guild. The seal is struck in soft lead rather than wax, so that a corrected passage may be flattened and re-cut without destroying the record beneath it. Clerks are instructed not to press the seal on a humid day.

The Transcription Cycle and limits of the office

The Third Scribe is a party to The Transcription Cycle but not its master. A text released by the office proceeds to the Confessors, returns marked, is recopied, and proceeds again, and at each return the Third Scribe must attest that the returned text is recognisably the same document as the one sent. This attestation is the office's most contested duty. In the winter of 3,932 a returned draft came back with its entire second chapter replaced by an inventory of lamps, and the then Third Scribe, Scribe-Mentor Goran, attested the document as recognisable on the grounds that its opening formula was intact. The Confessors accepted the attestation and struck the chapter independently. Goran's decision is still taught, chiefly as a warning.

"Recognisability shall be judged by the formula of commencement and the placement of the seal, and by no further test, the office having no means of judging what a text ought to say."

— Third Concordance, Annex 7, clause 3

That clause is contradicted by the Fifth Concordance's schedule of substantive attestation, which requires the Third Scribe to certify that no passage has been altered in sense. Both are cited routinely. The Scribe-Adjudicator of the eastern benches has declined four times to rule which prevails, noting on the fourth occasion that a ruling would settle the matter and should therefore be approached with caution.

The disputed succession

The principal scholarly disagreement concerning the office is whether the Third Scribe is a single continuous post or a series of officers each designated afresh. The Third Scribe's Guild held, until its dissolution under Clause 22 of the Third Concordance, that the designation was numeric — that the Third Scribe was the third of a line whose first two holders were recorded elsewhere and whose records are lost — and that only fragments from a single original document lineage could be collated under the one name. The Custodial Scribe Caste maintains the opposite: that "Third" is a station on the terrace and not a count, and that no first or second Scribe ever existed, the numbering having been assigned in error during a survey and never corrected because correction would require a survey.

Scribe-Provisional Aris argued in a widely circulated memorandum that both positions are compatible, the office being continuous in function and episodic in personnel, and that the dispute is therefore about a word. The memorandum was returned unread by two benches and read aloud at a third, to general silence. Scribe-Captain Aris is separately recorded among the four named holders of the Scribe Primus title since the Third Concordance, a fact the memorandum does not mention and which its critics have.

Notable holders and incidents

Halvden held the post for eleven years and is remembered for refusing to release any text at all during his final two, on the grounds that nothing returned from the Confessors was recognisably anything. His successor released the accumulated drafts in a single afternoon; the resulting confusion took nine months to unwind and produced the schedule of release now printed on the reverse of the seal case.

Librarian-Scribe Anselm the Circumspect served as Third Scribe before his elevation and left the office a marginal note that remains in the copying desk's drawer: that a corrected passage is never wrong, only later corrected. The note is consulted more often than the clause it comments on.

Floor 301 the Unblinking Scribe has petitioned the office at every change of holder since 3,880 for permission to inspect the master transcription directly, on the grounds that a transcription cannot be certified by an officer who has not seen it. The petition has been granted once, in 4,002, on condition that the inspecting officer be accompanied; the accompanying officer's report describes the visit as brief.

Record and current practice

The office maintains a single ledger, the Register of Contingent Corrections, in which each sealed alteration is entered with its date, its witness, and the reason given. Reasons are frequently terse. The entry for the ninth day of the eleventh month of 4,311 reads only "because it was wrong." The entry is not considered irregular.

Since the dissolution of the Third Scribe's Guild the office has absorbed the Guild's residual duty of passing unratified fragments to the nearest standing office, a practice the Guild described as customary and which the Third Scribe now performs without comment. The Scribe caste generally regards appointment to the post as the highest available distinction short of the benches, though the present holder has requested in writing that the stool be replaced. The request is under consideration by the Keeper of the Twenty-Third Spire, who has referred it to the Scribe-Adjudicator and received no answer.