Unsilent Quarries

The Unsilent Quarries are the sixty-seven designated extraction sites established under the Third Concordance for the taking of sound-bearing stone, in which the ordinary acoustic behaviour of a chamber may be altered, suspended, or reversed by the conduct of the quarrymen. They are not to be confused with the Silent Quarries, which produce mineral substrates of definitive non-acoustic property. The distinction is maintained in every recension after the Fourth, though the Fourth itself uses the two names interchangeably in Annex 9, an error the Second is sometimes blamed for and did not commit.

Each Quarry is held by a Keeper, and the Keepers are numbered rather than named in the standing register. The forty-second is Caspian, whose testimony before the Divan remains the fullest account of Unsilent practice on record. The sixty-seventh, unnumbered in the register for reasons discussed below, has not been visited since the winter of the year the stairwells froze.

Establishment

The Third Concordance establishes the Quarries in Clause 11, fixing their number at sixty-seven and requiring that each be sited at least one full turn of the spiral from any other, so that sounds raised in one may not be mistaken for sounds raised in the next. The siting clause has been waived four times, twice by the Seventh and twice by simple administrative lapse, and the resulting pairs are known in the register as the Proximate Pairs. Quarrymen working a Proximate Pair are required to strike in alternation and to keep a written tally of each other's strokes, a rule that has produced some eleven thousand pages of tally and no recorded disagreement.

The number sixty-seven is not arbitrary. Aethelred's Quarry, the first worked, yielded sixty-six measurable tones before it went quiet, and the founders took the count as an instruction. Whether they took it rightly is the subject of the oldest dispute in the Unsilent archives.

Practice

Work in an Unsilent Quarry proceeds by striking. The quarryman's hammer is not permitted to ring; it is wrapped in the felt of the Annex VII pattern and checked before each shift by the Keeper's second. What is taken from the face is not the stone but the interval the stone holds, decanted into the carrying vessels of the quarry and removed to the upper floors. The stone itself is left in place, and a worked face may be recognised by its smoothness and by the absence of any echo when spoken to.

The vessels are of three grades and are inventoried at the end of each shift. A standard inventory, quoted from the Annex Delta returns for the third quarter, runs:

• eleven sealed carrying vessels, sound-bearing, grade two;
• four vessels returned empty, two of them cracked at the rim;
• one vessel unaccounted for since the previous quarter, entered as "at large";
• six hammers, felt-wrapped, of which five serviceable.

Vessels entered as "at large" are not pursued. The Seventh rules at Clause 40 that a sound once loosed cannot be recovered by writ, and the ruling has been read broadly.

The numbering of Keepers

Keepers are numbered in order of appointment, and the number attaches to the post rather than the person. It is therefore possible to be the forty-second Keeper and the forty-second of the sixty-seven in the same breath, as Caspian was, and the register does not distinguish the two senses. This has caused the Quarries more difficulty than any single substantive dispute. In the year of the great recension, a clerk of the Annex B scriptorium, one Marrow by the sign-manual, spent four months corresponding with himself in two hands, one arguing that the numbers were ordinal and the other that they were not, before either hand prevailed. The correspondence survives in eleven folios and is bound with the Quarry returns under a title he did not choose: Marrow's Doubt.

The sixty-seventh Quarry is unnumbered because the numbering passed sixty-seven before the Quarry was sited. It has never been resolved whether the register should be extended or the Quarry struck from the list, and in the meantime it is worked sporadically by whoever can find it.

Disputes

The principal doctrinal disagreement concerns what the Quarries produce. The Third, at Clause 14, describes the yield as "sound kept against its season," implying a substance held in suspension. The Fourth, Annex 9, describes the same yield as "the residue of sound after its use," implying something spent. Caspian testified before the Divan that he had handled both and could not tell them apart except by weight, and that the weight varied with the weather. The Divan did not resolve the question and instead ordered that the vessels be weighed twice, which is now done.

A second dispute, quieter, concerns the Proximate Pairs. The Seventh permits the tally to be kept in a single hand where both quarrymen agree; the Aethelred recension forbids it on the grounds that a single hand hears only once. In practice the tally is kept in one hand and initialled by two, a compromise that satisfies neither document and has never been challenged.

"Where two quarries stand within one turn, let the strokes be answered, each to each, and let no man strike twice unheard."

— Third Concordance, Clause 11, second recension

Access and condition

The Quarries are reached by the Annex Delta landings and by no other route, and the landings are closed to visitors during the striking hours, which are posted at the stairhead and are not the same on any two floors. Visitors admitted outside those hours are asked to remove their boots at the threshold and to speak only in a whisper, and are reminded that whistling is prohibited throughout.

The condition of the faces is inspected each quarter by the Keeper of the Quarries of Echo, an office that has no formal connection to the Unsilent Quarries and has declined three times to be given one. His reports are filed with the basalt returns, where they are difficult to find and have twice been cited in error by the Divan.