The Rite of Investiture

New students entering Blacktower Academy must undergo the Rite of Investiture.

The ground is the plaza before the South Hall, paved in great hexagonal slabs, each about a man's width, pale gray, their edges worn round, the one at the center a little larger than the rest; the whole plaza is some 30 zhang across. To the north stands the South Hall — a stone hall of two stories with two spires at its top, flat-crowned as the Black Tower is, its walls a shade deeper gray than the Academy's other buildings. Three people stand upon the steps: at the center the master of rites in a scholar's robe of pure black, a very small device embroidered at his collar that belongs to none of the Seven Great Houses; on either side an assistant, one bearing a stack of thin bronze registers, the other a bronze bell.

The day before, the kitchen sends the entry tokens round to the lodges — thin plain wooden chips the size of a palm, the lodge number burned into one corner with an iron. A lost token must be replaced, and the paperwork takes 3 days. At the Hour of the Snake the bronze bell is struck 3 times to open the rite, and the names are called by the first character of the house name; as each house is called, that house's new students come forward to the foot of the steps. The master of rites calls the name, the branch, the station within the Academy, and then the allotment: which lodge he is to live in, how many hours of training, in which quarter he takes his meals, whether he has standing to sit in the hall. An assistant passes over the corresponding bronze register; the new student takes it up in both hands, bows his head once, and withdraws into the line. Anyone late is called out to an empty place before them all.

When the seven houses have been called through, the master of rites pauses a beat and calls "recommended commoners"; he pauses another beat and calls "Special Branch." Around the edge of the plaza stands a ring of elders from the several houses, in house dress, come to watch their own heirs receive their registers.

The house register is of bronze, the size of a palm, cut with the house branch, the station within the Academy, and the allotment; held in the hand, the rise and fall of the inscription can be felt, and the register stays with the man for the whole of his life. What the descendant of the Eighth Branch receives, stripped of his surname, is a blank register — the same size, polished the same, one face perfectly flat, with no inscription upon it at all. The reason the master of rites read out was brief: "The Eighth Branch has at present no register; by dynastic custom a blank register is conferred. For the holder of a blank register, the lodge number is at the guide's discretion; the hours of training are to be supplied later, the dining quarter is to be deliberated; there is no standing to sit in the hall."

For what is to be done when the system meets a case never written down, Volume Three of The Capital Manual of Etiquette leaves half a page:

Should a new student of a special branch meet with a case not covered by the system now in force, the guide shall dispose of it at his discretion, and the Academy shall respect the guide's judgment.

A blank bronze plate is the whole of the place the dynasty gives to a person it does not acknowledge.