Tower Year 14322

Tower Year 14,322 is a numbered year in the standard reckoning of the Tower Calendar, falling between Tower Year 14,321 and Tower Year 14,323. It is chiefly remembered as the year in which the First Inquest was initiated by petition, and is otherwise known — in the phrasing fixed by Concordance 88-C — as the Year of the Lapsed Standard. No other year in the fourteenth millennium carries two competing designations in official use, a circumstance that has produced a small but persistent literature of its own.

Designations

The year holds the numeral 14,322 without controversy. Its names do not. The designation Year of the Lapsed Standard was entered into the register of styled years in the ninth month of 14,322 itself, by the office of the Keeper of the Styled Register, on the grounds that the year had "lapsed from the shape of its neighbours" — a phrase whose meaning the Keeper declined to elaborate when asked, and which the Second Inquest later declined to rule on.

The alternative usage, "the year the Inquest came," appears in no register and in several hundred private memoranda. It is not a styled year and may not be cited in pleadings.

The First Inquest

The First Inquest was initiated by petition in Tower Year 14,322. The petition was carried to the Chamber of Initiation by the residents of Floors 6,041 through 6,044, who sought a determination on a question of long standing: whether a floor whose name had been mislaid (not lost, the petition was careful to say — mislaid) retained its number.

The Inquest sat for eleven years and issued no finding, on the reasoning that a floor cannot be adjudicated absent its name. The four floors remain numbered and unnamed, and are counted in the general survey. Visitors are asked not to attempt to name them.

"The Inquest shall not conclude a matter on which the parties are content to be uncertain; uncertainty is the ordinary condition of the archive and the conclusion of it is not among the Inquest's purposes."

— First Inquest, Instrument of Initiation, clause 6

Dispute over the year's length

A scholarly disagreement persists concerning whether Tower Year 14,322 contained a full complement of months. The Concordance on Measurement (Annex 2) holds that the year was regular in all particulars: "no month was shortened, abated, or held over, and the year closed on its appointed day." The Third Concordance, Annex 4, holds the reverse, and gives a figure: 14,322 was short by nine days, which were carried forward and spent in Tower Year 14,323, a year already full at the time.

The discrepancy is not resolvable from the record, because the Stair-Register of Months for the relevant span was removed to Floor 2,190 for rebinding in the following year and has not been returned. The Magistracy of Pre-Cataloguement Review has twice declined to order its retrieval, Magistrate Valen ruling in the second instance that "the register is not lost; it is elsewhere, which is a different thing and not a matter for this bench."

Commemorative and administrative acts

Three instruments were sealed in 14,322 and remain in force:

• The Instrument of Initiation, sealed in the second month, establishing the First Inquest.
• The Riding of the Styled Register, 14,322, by which the Year of the Lapsed Standard received its name.
• The Ninth Amending Schedule to the Concordance of Floor Numbers, which altered eleven floor numbers and restored none of them.

The Ninth Amending Schedule is the subject of an unresolved grievance held by the Clerk of Annexes, Floor 411, who maintains that her annex was renumbered during the year without notice and that correspondence addressed to the old number now reaches a stairwell. The Office of Numbered Things has acknowledged the renumbering and disputes only the word "without notice," producing a circular dated the fourth month of the year and addressed, by the Office's own admission, to the wrong floor.

Later reference

Because the year carries two names, it is disproportionately cited. The Bureau of Precedent recorded 1,904 citations to 14,322 in the century following its close — more than to any other year of the fourteenth millennium, and nearly all of them concerned with which name to use rather than with anything done in the year itself. The Bureau's standing note on the matter reads, in full: "Cite the numeral. The numeral is not in dispute."

The year is not to be confused with Year 312, notwithstanding that the Edict of Compensatory Reference is occasionally misdated to 14,322 in secondary recensions of the Year of the Dust Settled Ledger. The error is thought to have entered through a copyist working from a palimpsest on Floor 3,700, and has been corrected in the archive's own holdings but not, so far as can be determined, anywhere else.