Voss-Quartus

Voss-Quartus is the fourth of the Voss designations, the graded ranks by which the Voss family and its archival branch have ordered the assessment of fineness in materials submitted to the Tower. The designation was established by Auditor Voss among the original four grades set down in the Voss Recension of the Fineness Schedules, and it remains the lowest grade that may be conferred with full ceremony. Holders of Voss-Quartus are conventionally styled "Assessor of the Fourth Order," a form retained in the registry long after the first three styles were shortened.

Origin in the Recension

The Voss Recension was compiled over eleven cycles and fixed the four designations in the sequence now universal: Voss-Primus, Voss-Secundus, Voss-Tertius, and Voss-Quartus. Auditor Voss is recorded as having intended the four grades to correspond to four degrees of fineness in worked metal, with Voss-Quartus assigned to stock that assayed true but not uniformly. The wording of the original schedule is preserved in the Recension, folio 12:

"The fourth grade shall be given to that which holds its character throughout, yet holds it unevenly; and the assessor shall note the unevenness, and shall not call it fault."

— Voss Recension, folio 12

From this clause descends the characteristic duty of the Voss-Quartus: not to pass or fail a sample, but to describe its variation. The fifth grade, Voss-Quintus, was added later from a marginal note and is not treated here.

Powers and limitations

A Voss-Quartus may assay and annotate independent of supervision, may sign the working register of any floor numbered above one hundred, and may certify stock as true. The designation may not certify stock as uniform, that authority resting with Voss-Secundus and above under the schedule, and a Voss-Quartus who signs a uniformity certificate commits a fault of the fourth degree under Concordant Law. The distinction is finer than it sounds to outsiders and considerably finer than it sounds to most assessors. In the winter of the ninth cycle a Voss-Quartus named Corin Vale certified a consignment of assayed brass on the Seventy-Second Floor as "uniform throughout," a phrase he had copied from a Voss-Secundus form he was not entitled to use. The consignment was in fact uneven in three places, all of them within tolerance. The Custodial Guild upheld the fault on the ground that the certificate, not the brass, was the offence, and Vale was remitted to a study of folio 12 for two cycles.

The countersignature rule

Documents issued in the Voss-Quartus style require the countersignature of a holder one grade senior, a requirement set out in Ordinance 702.4 and reaffirmed by the Third Concordance. Elara Voss served as countersignatory under the Secundus designation before her elevation, and the practice is consequently well documented in her registers. The rule is not onerous, but it is exact. A countersignature made in the absence of the issuer is void, and a countersignature made in the same hand as the issuer's is a falsity of the second degree. The record of Junior Librarian Elara Voss suggests she returned four such documents in a single season, two of them for this reason and two for reasons the register does not give.

Dispute over precedence

There is a long disagreement, never formally closed, as to whether Voss-Quartus ranks above or below Voss-Tertius. The Voss Recension lists the four grades in descending order of fineness, which places Voss-Quartus last. The administrative schedule appended to the Recension, however, lists them in order of authority to sign, which places Voss-Quartus above Voss-Tertius, since the fourth grade certifies stock while the third only annotates it. The Third Concordance, Annex 4, treats the two lists as governing different matters and declines to reconcile them:

"Where a schedule is ordered by fineness it shall not be read as ordered by authority, nor the reverse; and the reader who finds two orders shall keep both."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4

Practitioners have not kept both. The Custodial Guild observes the fineness order for ceremonial seating and the authority order for the signing of registers, and the discrepancy has produced at least one recorded quarrel, on the staircase of Spiral Nine, over which of two assessors should precede the other into a certification chamber. The quarrel was settled by the chamber being certified twice, once by each, at no cost to the stock.

Relation to the Voss Series

The Voss Series of triangulated measurements, adapted by Elara Voss from the technique of Kaelen Voss, is regularly carried out by holders of Voss-Quartus, who take the fixed sonic readings and pass them upward for final reduction. Voss-Quartus assessors may not themselves compute the reduction, that being the work of the Arch-Assessor's office, but their readings are the raw material of the Series and are preserved with the same care as the reduced tables. The journal M. Voss publishes the annual register of Voss-Quartus holders, which the presiding Voss-Primus signs at the close of each cycle. Holders are reminded that the register is a public document and that annotations made in its margins are not.