Warden-hours

Warden-hours

Warden-hours are the units of time on which the Tower's Wardens are understood to operate — not clock hours, nor the variable "posted hours" fixed for Reading Rooms by the Ordinance of Posted Hours, but a separate reckoning kept on the assumption that a Warden's obligations accrue at a rate different from an ordinary occupant's. The unit is nowhere defined in statute. It is inferred, maintained, and disputed, which is usually the strongest evidence a unit is in active use.

The standard working figure is that one Warden-hour equals one and a quarter ordinary hours, a conversion first set out informally in the margin of the Ninth Concordance and never ratified in the body of any Concordance since. The margin note is unsigned, unsealed, and still the basis on which the Bureau of Residual Mechanics maintains the Warden clock on Spiral 4.

Origin and the Margin Note

The margin note — catalogued as Ninth Concordance, folio 212, recto, lower margin — reads in full: "Let a Warden's hour be a quarter longer than the common hour, for the Warden answers at both ends of it." It accompanied an amendment concerning the scheduling of authentication ceremonies, and appears to have been added by a copyist rather than composed by the drafting Librarians, since the script is smaller than the surrounding hand and the ink two shades lighter. The Warden of the Chroniclers has declined to authenticate the note, and the Scriptorium of Unclaimed Hours has declined to strike it, leaving it in a condition the Scribal Recension Committee once described as "present in every copy and authoritative in none" (Scribal Recension Committee, Memorandum 318).

In practice the Warden of Descent maintains a shift log computed in common hours and a second, parallel log in Warden-hours; the two do not agree at the end of a quarter, and nobody has been asked to make them.

The Warden Clock and the Regency

The Warden clock on Spiral 4 is a jewelled escapement striking a divided bell. It does not run in Warden-hours itself. It runs in common hours and is read against a conversion table riveted to the wall beside it, which is itself misriveted at the four-hour mark by the thickness of a finger-joint. The maintenance note beneath the table reads, in the flat register of such notices: "Visitors are requested not to touch the Warden."

Temporal regency — the assignment of a Warden's unexpired Warden-hours to a successor during a vacancy — is governed by the Eleventh Concordance, Annex 3, which provides that "hours accrued but not answered shall pass entire to the next incumbent, and shall not be averaged." The Warden of Boundary Arbitration applied the clause in Cycle 761 to settle a contested handover between two Wardens of the Ephemeral Stacks, holding that the outgoing Warden's final nine Warden-hours — which, on the margin-note conversion, amounted to eleven and one-quarter common hours — passed as a unit. The outgoing Warden objected that the hours had already been spent. Warden Ardon Vell, then twenty-seventh incumbent of that office, recorded: "That a thing spent may also pass is the whole of the difficulty, and I do not resolve it" (Vell, Adjudications, vol. II, p. 74).

Dispute Between the Concordances

The Fifth Concordance at clause 44 provides that "no reckoning not divisible by twelve shall bind an incumbent," which would seem to abolish the Warden-hour outright. The Ninth Concordance at clause 9 presumes its existence and allows the conversion to be applied without the divisibility test at "all hours between the eighth bell and the eighth bell." The two clauses are irreconcilable and both remain in force. The Librarians have settled the conflict by not settling it: the Concordance of Pending Repeals lists clause 44 as "suspended in application to Warden offices, pending," where it has stood for one hundred and six years.

"Where two clauses cannot both hold, the Tower does not choose between them. It records that both were read."

— Concordance of Pending Repeals, Preamble

The consequence is a standing inconsistency in the rosters. The Warden of the Silent Stroke records its hours in fifths and sixtieths; the Warden of the Chroniclers records in whole Warden-hours, rounding down; the Warden of Ephemeral Stacks has been known to record in nothing at all and has been remonstrated with three times, most recently in the winter of Cycle 869, when a whole quarter's ledger was found to have been kept in the margins of a withdrawal register belonging to the Vault of Silent Hours.

Application: Certificates of Temporal Exhaustion

The only formal use of the Warden-hour is in the audit that precedes a Certificate of Temporal Exhaustion. Because the Scriptorium of Unclaimed Hours issues such certificates after a tripartite audit, and because the clause establishing the audit specifies that "the hours of the auditing Wardens shall stand in their own reckoning," the Certificate's arithmetic depends entirely on which conversion is applied. Two certificates issued in Cycle 877 on the same subject — one to the Warden of Descent, one to the Warden of the Silent Stroke — differ by four Warden-hours and have never been reconciled; both remain valid.

Inventory of Common Readings

The readings in ordinary use, as they appear on the Warden clock's conversion table, are:

• 1 Warden-hour — 1.25 common hours (margin note, unratified)
• 1 Warden-shift — 12 Warden-hours — 15 common hours (customary, Spiral 4)
• 1 Warden-year — 288 Warden-shifts — 1.03 common years (disputed; the Regulator of Hours has declined to correct it)

The third reading is the one most often objected to, chiefly by the Regulator of Hours itself, which has observed that a year that is not quite a year is "worse than no year at all" — though it continues to commission instruments that assume the figure without adjusting any ledger (Regulator of Hours, Ruling 22). The Warden of the Last Page has recorded that the office answers all correspondence in common hours but signs in Warden-hours, "so that both parties may feel they have been served."