Watch-Clerks

The Watch-Clerks are the standing personnel of the Tower's watches: those clerks seconded, assigned, or in some contested cases conscripted to maintain continuous observation during a declared watch, and to record what is observed in the appropriate register. The office is not a single body but a class. Watch-Clerks may serve the Candlelight Watch, the Oscillation Watch, the Materialization Watch, or any of the several minor watches that maintain a nominal roster, and their standing is defined by the watch they serve rather than by any common charter. A Watch-Clerk is, in the phrasing of the Fourteenth Concordance, Annex 2, "a clerk under watch, and not a clerk at liberty, and shall not be regarded as both in the same shift."

Entry to the class is by secondment from a parent body. The Clerks of the Unblinking Eye supply the majority of Watch-Clerks to the Candlelight Watch; the Resonance Clerks supply the Oscillation Watch; and the Apparitor-Clerks supply, on loan and with visible reluctance, the Materialization Watch. A Watch-Clerk retains their parent body's seniority while under watch and forfeits it upon the watch's close until re-confirmed, a provision which has caused more quiet grievance than any other in the class's short recorded history.

Duties and the Register

The Watch-Clerk's central duty is the maintenance of the Vigil Register — the continuous written account of a watch, entered in the clerk's own hand and closed only at the chimes of the Great Clock or at the formal relief of the post. Entries are made at intervals set by the watch in question: the Candlelight Watch generally at the quarter-hour, the Oscillation Watch at every visible oscillation, and the Materialization Watch at whatever interval the event permits, which is frequently none.

The clerk is further charged with the custody of the illumination under watch. Watch-Clerks on the Candlelight Watch are issued Watch Candles from the sanctioned stock and are personally answerable for their consumption; the Chandlers' Guild has disputed this accounting for eleven years, maintaining that candles issued to clerks are consumed by the watch and not by the clerk, and that the difference ought to fall on the watch's budget rather than the clerk's ledger. The Guild's position is recorded in its Petition of the Ninth Winter and remains unanswered.

"The clerk who lights the candle is not the candle's author, nor its debtor; let the watch answer for its own burning."

— Chandlers' Guild, Petition of the Ninth Winter, clause 6

Watch-Clerks are prohibited from carrying a second light while under watch. This is stated without explanation in the standing orders of every watch that maintains a roster, and clerks comply with it as they comply with the weather.

The Affair of Clerk Vessin

The clearest precedent on the status of the class arises from the winter of the Eleventh Recension, when a Candlelight Watch-Clerk named Ordel Vessin of the Clerks of the Seventh Spiral entered an anomaly in the Vigil Register — a vocal resonance in a photophobic holding on a lower floor — and then, having completed the entry, closed the register and went to his quarters. The holding was not further observed for the remainder of the watch. The anomaly did not recur, which the Candlelight Watch treated as no evidence whatsoever, and Vessin was cited for abandonment of post.

His defence, which the tribunal preserved in full out of what appears to have been irritation, was that he had recorded the anomaly and that a recorded anomaly is by definition no longer unrecorded, and that his remaining at the post would have constituted a duplicate observation of a thing already catalogued. The tribunal rejected the argument but could not agree on the grounds, and the Twenty-Third Concordance was amended within the year to require that a Watch-Clerk remain at post "until relieved, whether or not the register is satisfied." Vessin was not dismissed. He was reassigned to the Oscillation Watch, where it is said he prospered.

Contested Standing: The Two Concordances

Scholarly dispute over the Watch-Clerks turns almost entirely on a contradiction between Concordances. The Sixteenth Concordance, clause 4, holds that a Watch-Clerk is a servant of the watch and holds no independent authority: "the clerk observes; the watch decides." The Thirty-First Concordance, drafted some decades later and apparently without reference to the Sixteenth, holds in Annex 1 that "the clerk at watch is the watch's whole authority during the interval of the watch, and what the clerk does not record did not occur."

The two positions cannot both govern the same shift, and the Concordance Revision Board has twice declined to reconcile them, on the ground that the question is not presently before it. The practical consequence is that a Watch-Clerk's authority depends on which Concordance the reviewing officer happens to cite first. Clerks of Coincidence have catalogued forty-one instances of the two clauses being invoked in the same proceeding, in every case by different officers and in no case with a resolution.

The Candlelight Watch holds, unofficially but consistently, that the Sixteenth governs during a watch and the Thirty-First governs after it, a reading for which there is no textual support and which has nonetheless settled most disputes for the last sixty years.

Relief and the Standing Rota

Watch-Clerks are assigned from the standing rota maintained by the Office of Catalogic Logistics, which posts reliefs at intervals dictated by the watch and by the availability of clerks who have not recently served. The Clerks of the Spiral Body and the Clerks of the Coiled Dimension alternate supplying the overnight relief on a schedule that has been redrawn nine times and disputed at every redrawing.

Upon relief, a Watch-Clerk surrenders the register to the incoming clerk, returns any unburnt candles to the sanctioned stock, and signs the relief column in a hand that must be legible to a clerk who has not met them. The requirement is enforced. Clerks who cannot produce a legible relief signature are returned to the rota, which is regarded in the class as a mild disgrace and a considerable inconvenience. Watcher Occupation records the reliefs of the upper floors and is not, despite frequent confusion, a record of Watch-Clerks.

No Watch-Clerk is permitted to hold two watches concurrently, irrespective of any reading of the Thirty-First Concordance, and no Watch-Clerk may serve a watch on a floor they have not previously walked. Both rules are old, both are obeyed, and neither is written down anywhere that the archive has yet located.