Twenty-First Concordance

Overview

The Twenty-First Concordance is the eighteenth-surviving recension of the Concordance cycle, sealed in the Tower year 688 AT and held in the West Reading Room of Floor 1,114. It is chiefly remembered for two instruments: the designation of the transition floors, and the regulatory framework for the Oscillation Watch set out in its Annex Sigma. No complete copy exists. The surviving text comprises one hundred and four leaves, of which eleven are the work of at least three later hands.

The Concordance has never been formally repealed. This is a matter of some irritation to the Office of the Twenty-Third Spire, which regards the designation of transition floors as functionally superseded by the Twenty-Third Concordance and yet cannot say so in writing without conceding that a floor may be both a transition floor and an ordinary one at the same time.

The Transition Floors

Article 3 of the Concordance defines a transition floor as any floor "on which the arriving party and the departing party are not, at the moment of passage, in agreement as to which floor it is." The definition is deliberately circular and the drafters knew it. Floor 1,114 is named in the schedule as the exemplary case, a designation that has never been withdrawn and that the West Reading Room continues to observe by posting a notice at the landing.

The schedule originally listed nine floors. A tenth, Floor 2,209, was added by marginal annotation in a hand identified as that of Clerk Anselm Rhone and was never ratified. Rhone's grievance is preserved in a memorandum of 691 AT: he had waited eleven years for the annexe to be opened, was told it would be opened "in the ordinary course," and died before the ordinary course arrived. The floor remains on the schedule. No one has been willing to strike it.

Annex Sigma and the Oscillation Watch

Annex Sigma occupies leaves 61 to 79 and provides the whole regulatory furniture of the Oscillation Watch: its complement, its rotations, the hours at which readings are taken, and the means by which a reading is recorded when the watchkeeper is uncertain whether the floor has moved or the instrument has. Clause 9 is the operative provision:

"Where the needle is observed to return to its former position within the space of one hundred breaths, the watchkeeper shall record the interval as a coincidence, and shall not record it twice."

— Twenty-First Concordance, Annex Sigma, Clause 9

The clause is generally read as an economy measure. Second Archivist Vell argued in 902 AT that it was a theological concession, and was asked to withdraw the word "theological" and did so, and then used it again in a footnote.

Textual History and Dispute

The date of sealing is not in dispute; the date of first sealing is. The Twenty-Second Concordance refers in passing to "the Twenty-First as it stood before its correction," a phrase that implies an earlier and different text. Annex G of that document goes further and quotes Clause 9 in a form that does not appear in any surviving leaf of the Twenty-First — the interval given as eighty breaths rather than one hundred.

Three positions have been taken. The Recensionists, led by Vell, hold that the Twenty-First was corrected in 694 AT and that the eighty-breath form is the earlier reading preserved by accident. The Continuity Party holds that Annex G misquotes, as it does elsewhere, and that the error is the Twenty-Second's alone. The Office of the Twenty-Third Spire declines to take a position, noting only that the question is "of no consequence to the Watch, which counts in hundreds." A fourth position, advanced once in the Twenty-Ninth Concordance and never repeated, is that both readings are correct and the needle is the one thing that has changed.

Relation to Later Instruments

The Twenty-First was superseded in most practical matters by the Twenty-Second Concordance and, on questions of hierarchical arbitration, by the Twenty-Third Concordance. It nonetheless remains citable. The Twenty-Fourth Concordance governs coordination between spires "where the Twenty-Third is silent," and the Twenty-Third is silent on transition floors precisely because the Twenty-First is not. Practitioners therefore cite the Twenty-First for the definition and the Twenty-Third for the authority, and the two are read side by side in the Registry Procedures, which reproduce the schedule in full without comment.

Copies are held at Floor 500, at the West Reading Room, and in the annexe of the Oscillation Watch itself, where the copy is kept chained and is missing the final quire. Visitors may consult it on request. Ink is not supplied.