Tower Wardens

Tower Wardens is the collective designation applied, in the administrative literature of the middle floors, to the several bodies that claim custodial authority over the Tower's structure in its vertical sense. The term is not a title any warden uses of themselves. It appears chiefly in the recensions and indices compiled by the Wardens of the Vaults, who adopted it in 41 AR as a shorthand for the standing dispute between the Spire Wardens' Guild, the Corridor Wardens, and the Void-Wardens over which of them may be said to keep the Tower itself. No document establishes the office, and three separate Councils of Revision have declined to strike the term from the indices on the grounds that it remains useful.

Origins of the designation

The earliest recorded use occurs in a marginal note in the register of Floor 212, dated to the winter of 39 AR, in which an unnamed indexer distinguishes between "the wardens of things on floors" and "the Tower Wardens, if such there be." The note is not signed. The Vaults' compilers, preparing the second recension of the general index two years later, required a heading under which to file the Guild's standing claims to vertical jurisdiction without conceding them, and adopted the indexer's phrase. The heading has survived every subsequent revision, though its scope has narrowed and widened by turns.

The Third Concordance addresses the same material without ever using the term. Its seventeen documents refer throughout to "the three custodial parties," a formulation its Annex 4 defends at length on the grounds that naming a fourth category would imply a fourth claimant. The compiler of the Third Concordance's index, working from a different recension, cross-referenced "the three custodial parties" to "Tower Wardens" — an editorial decision the Vaults have never rescinded and the Guild has never forgiven.

Competing claimants

Three bodies are conventionally listed under the heading, though none accepts the subordination.

Spire Wardens' Guild

Claims structural, acoustic, and temporal integrity over the vertical spires, and by extension over anything whose propagation is vertical. Administers Crane Spire and maintains the Bureau of Harmonic Integrity, which works most closely with the Provisional Stone-Wardens Committee on questions touching Living Stone.

Corridor Wardens

Claims the horizontal fabric of floors and passages, and asserts that the vertical is merely the horizontal stood on end. Holds joint authority with the Provisional Stone-Wardens Committee over every deposit of Living Stone. Has contested the Guild's vertical claims in writing at least eleven times since 12 AR.

Void-Wardens

Claims neither direction but the spaces between, including stairwells, risers, and the sealed apertures catalogued in Observation Permits. Objects to the heading on the grounds that their custody is of absence, which cannot be subsumed under a term denoting structure.

A fourth name, the Wardens of the Spiral, is sometimes appended to the list by inexperienced indexers. The Spiral receives its authority from the Spire Wardens' Guild by instrument of grant and holds nothing in its own right; the Vaults' third recension inserted a note to this effect after the error was found in nine separate floor registers.

The question of the Seal-Wardens

Whether the Seal-Wardens belong under the heading is the subject of the longest-running disagreement in the index's history. The Seal-Wardens approve every petition for a Chamber Sealing and thus exercise authority over the closure of vertical structures — an authority that, on the narrow reading advanced by the Guild in 27 AR, is procedural rather than custodial. The Vaults' compilers have taken the opposite view, observing that a sealed chamber is more securely the Tower's than an open one.

"A body which may close a chamber may open it; and what may be opened is kept. The distinction between keeping and permitting is one the Guild has never been able to draw to the satisfaction of this office."

— Memorandum of the Compiling Office, Wardens of the Vaults, 28 AR, appended to the second recension

The Seal-Wardens have not commented. Their returns for the years 30 to 44 AR list the heading as "inapplicable" without further remark.

Incident of Floor 44

The designation acquired its present prominence after the events on Floor 44 in the winter of 52 AR, when the Salt Flats of FloorFoor 44 — a deposit whose propagation was found to be both vertical and horizontal, and which resisted classification under either the Guild's or the Corridor Wardens' instruments — was claimed simultaneously by both bodies. The Corridor Wardens cited the horizontal extent of the deposit; the Guild cited its rise through eleven floors. The Western Salt-Corridor was closed for six weeks while the claims were argued.

The dispute was resolved by recourse to the Ordinance of Remedial Quietude, which neither party had invoked and which both accepted, it being the only instrument under which each could claim partial success. A residual claim was afterward filed by the Void-Wardens upon the air above the flats, on the reasoning that the deposit had displaced it. The Vaults' compilers record no disposition of this claim and note, in the margin, "pending."

The warden of the floor during the closure, a clerk named Havren Oss, submitted a grievance in 53 AR concerning the loss of six weeks' measurements. The grievance was returned unopened on the grounds that he had addressed it to "the Tower Wardens," a body the Registry could not confirm. Oss resubmitted it eleven times, addressing it each time to a different claimant, and received eleven refusals. His twelfth submission, addressed to all three, was accepted and filed. No reply has been issued.

Status in the indices

The heading persists. The Vaults' current recension retains it with the note "collective; contested; see also each," while the Guild's own index lists it under "terms of convenience, not of record." The Corridor Wardens' returns omit it entirely. The Third Concordance, when amended in 58 AR, added a clause to Annex 4 providing that no term in the general index shall be construed as creating an office; the clause does not name the heading, and the compilers have read it as directed elsewhere.

Visitors consulting the index are asked to return the volume to the shelf with its spine outward. The reading desks on Floor 212 are not to be moved.