# Halberd and Ossuary

Halberd ran Nailhouse. Ossuary ran Dead Letter. The boards opened four months
apart in 1986, served overlapping callers on the same exchange, and were run by
two people whose stated positions on every substantive question were, on
examination, the same. They did not speak to each other for eleven years.

## The boards

| | Nailhouse | Dead Letter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| opened | March 1986 | July 1986 |
| lines | one, then two from 1989 | one, always |
| policy on logs | kept, published on request | kept, never published |
| policy on the Count | forty days, no exceptions | forty days, exceptions at the sysop's discretion |
| closed | 1999 | 2001 |

The last row of that table is the feud. Everything else in it is decoration.

## The dispute

Halberd's position was that [[lore/long-count]] is a period of silence and that
a period of silence with exceptions is a period of silence with a doorman.
Ossuary's position was that the Count tests whether someone can wait, that
waiting is not the same as being unable to speak, and that a person who breaks
the silence to report a fault on the board has demonstrated the quality being
tested rather than failing to.

Both of these are good arguments. Neither man ever said the other's was bad. The
Ledger printed the exchange in No. 39 and readers wrote in for two issues
afterwards complaining that they could not tell which side they were meant to be
on, which is the correct response and did not help.

What made it a feud rather than a disagreement was that it was operational. A
caller who sat the Count on Dead Letter and was passed was not recognised on
Nailhouse, and had to sit it again. Forty days is a long time to be told does
not count. Between 1988 and 1996 the two boards maintained separate and
incompatible rosters of people who had done the same thing.

## The hand-off

In the autumn of 1996 Ossuary handed [[lore/marrow-tape]] to Halberd at the
Fallow meet, in front of about thirty people, without a speech. Halberd took it,
said thank you, and put it in a coat pocket. That is the entire event and it is
the most heavily documented sixty seconds in the underground's literature,
because everybody present wrote it down afterwards and nobody understood it.

Three explanations circulate.

- **The obligation.** Custody of the tape carries an obligation to hand it on to
  someone who will keep the rules. There was nobody else in the room Ossuary
  trusted to keep them, and the fact that he did not like Halberd was not
  relevant to the question, because the rules are not about liking.
- **The concession.** That the hand-off was the argument being conceded — that a
  discretionary rule (who gets the tape) was being exercised in favour of the
  man who did not believe in discretionary rules, which is either a joke or a
  surrender depending on how generous you are.
- **The plainest one.** That Ossuary's year was up and Halberd was next in a
  sequence agreed years earlier by people now dead, and that the reason nobody
  understood it is that it was not about them.

## The Armistice

Ten months later, in July 1997, Dead Letter's login banner changed. See
[[lore/armistice-banner]]: it is fifteen lines, it names nobody, and everyone
who saw it understood it immediately. Nailhouse did not change its banner and
did not need to. The rosters were merged within the month by the simple method
of neither board checking any more.

## The obituary

Halberd died in 1999. Nailhouse went dark in the same week, and there was no
announcement, because the underground had no mechanism for announcements —
compare [[lore/sisken]], where the absence of a mechanism turned an ending into
a disappearance.

What there was instead was a file on Dead Letter, added and never mentioned,
which is Ossuary's obituary for Halberd. It runs to two pages. It restates
Halberd's side of the Count argument better than Halberd ever did, concedes one
point, and then declines to concede the other in a single sentence that is
frequently quoted and never in full:

> He was right that a rule with an exception in it is a rule about the person
> holding the exception, and I would rather be that person than pretend the
> position does not exist.

It is the best-written document either of them produced and it is a rebuttal.

## Related

- [[lore/index]] — the collection
- [[lore/long-count]] — the thing they disagreed about
- [[lore/marrow-tape]] — the object that changed hands
- [[lore/armistice-banner]] — how it ended
- [[lore/lineage]] — the two rosters, and where they rejoin