Western Annexation Accords

The Western Annexation Accords are a body of six instruments, ratified between Tower Calendar 12,441 and 12,463, governing the western approach of Annexation — that is, the band of stairwells, landings, and interstitial margins lying westward of Annex 7-D and south of the Western Administrative Spire. They are not a single document and have never been consolidated, a fact the Concordance Compliance office has noted eleven times without remedy. Where the general procedure of Lateral Annexation is prescribed by Annex A and the Vell Doctrine, the Accords govern the narrower question of what may be done when a western space is already, in some sense, partly annexed before anyone arrives to annex it.

Composition and dating

The six instruments are conventionally listed together, and the Tower Coordinate Grid designation for each is given in the order the Accords themselves use:

• Accord I — the Boundary Recension (12,441), on the survey of the western margin.
• Accord II — the Instrument of Presumptive Holding (12,443), permitting custody of a western space pending formal entry.
• Accord III — the Airspace Schedule (12,447), issued in the same season as the Parchment Vaults Annexation and frequently confused with it.
• Accord IV — the Aperture Rectification (12,452), occasioned by irregularities at the Western Aperture Delta.
• Accord V — the Reconciliation of Names (12,458), which fixed the boundary between the Western register and the Annexed Atrium returns.
• Accord VI — the Sinking Clause (12,463), on spaces that have moved westward after annexation.

The Accords are administered jointly by the Office of Western Affairs and the Office of Coincidental Alignment, a division of competence that has itself been the subject of four disputes. The Office of Western Affairs holds the survey stakes; the Office of Coincidental Alignment holds the interpretation of External Compatibility, which in the western margin is rarely straightforward. The Oversight Conclave reviews both, and has twice declined to.

The presumptive holding

Accord II is the operative heart of the Accords. It provides that a western space already carrying traces of prior cataloguing — a shelf mark painted over, a stair numbered twice, a lintel bearing an entry that appears in no register — may be taken into presumptive holding without a completed entry in the Tower Coordinate Grid. This is a substantial departure from Annexation as generally practised, under which annexation is legally binding only once entered into the Grid.

The justification, offered by the surveyor Librarian Ossel Vane in her recension of 12,441, was that the western margin was being catalogued faster than it could be annexed, and that the alternative was to leave material in spaces that no longer existed. Her formula is still cited:

"A space that holds an entry before it holds a number is not unannexed. It is early."

— Librarian Ossel Vane, Boundary Recension, preamble

Presumptive holding was intended to last no more than a season. The oldest presumptive holding still outstanding is at the western margin landing designated 7-D/west, entered in 12,444 and never confirmed; the file remains open, and a clerk from the Office of Western Affairs visits it each winter to confirm that the stair is where it was left.

Accord III and the question of airspace

The Airspace Schedule governs the volume above annexed western floors, which in the western approach is often Annexed Airspace of uncertain extent. Accord III fixes the ceiling of an annexed western landing at fourteen courses above the threshold, with the exception of spaces opened under the Ninth Spiral Accords, which retain whatever ceiling their original survey recorded. This exception was added at the request of the Apse commission and has been applied, so far as the registers show, twice.

It is here that the Third Concordance intrudes. Its clause permitting "unilateral declaration under 'imminent archival overflow' during Lateral Annexation" has been read by the Office of Western Affairs as authorising a western officer to declare overflow and extend the ceiling of Accord III without reference to the Schedule. The Office of Coincidental Alignment reads the clause as confined to floors opened after 12,447. No reconciliation has been attempted since 12,455, when the two offices agreed to disagree in writing and both filed the agreement under separate numbers.

The Sinking Clause and its difficulties

Accord VI addresses a phenomenon specific to the western approach: annexed spaces that subsequently drift westward, usually by a few courses a year, occasionally by an entire bay in a single winter. The Clause holds that a space that has moved after annexation retains its original number but acquires the designation displaced, which must be appended to the floor name on all returns until the space is either returned to its position or re-annexed under fresh survey.

The difficulty is that displacement is measured against the Boundary Recension, and the Recension's stakes have themselves shifted. The Office of Western Affairs maintains that the stakes are fixed to the stair and the stair to the Tower; the Office of Coincidental Alignment maintains that a stake which moves is not a stake. Between 12,458 and 12,463 some two hundred and forty western spaces were recorded as displaced, and of these, following resurvey, eighty-one had not moved at all. The remainder had, in most cases, moved twice.

Criticism and the Sceptical School

The Accords are among the documents most frequently cited by the Sceptical School established after the Accords of Disambiguation, which argues in its Third Memorial (12,460) that a presumptive holding is "an entry without a floor, and therefore a floor without an entry, and therefore nothing whatever" — a formulation the Office of Western Affairs has declined to answer on the grounds that it is not a question.

More practically, the schooling clerks observe that the Accords have never been consolidated and that Accord IV and Accord V contradict one another on the naming of the western returns, so that a single atrium may lawfully be entered under two names on the same day. The Western Concordance was drafted in 12,461 to resolve this and was referred to committee, where it remains. Visitors are asked not to move the western stakes.

The Accords have not been amended since 12,463. The Office of Western Affairs describes this as a period of consolidation. The Office of Coincidental Alignment describes it as a period of waiting.