The Guild of Maintainers was the D'ni Guild responsible for law enforcement outside the Age of D'ni. Maintainers approved newly written Ages, made regular inspections of Ages to ensure their proper upkeep, and destroyed flawed books. They were also responsible for D'ni relations with arotantē, the non-Ronay peoples found on other worlds. They worked cooperatively with the City Guard, a separate organization responsible for policing D'ni, regulating traffic, and protecting the king. A modern analogy might be to think of the City Guard as the urban police force, and the Maintainers as the sheriff's department.

Around 8500 DE, the Maintainers inaugurated a force responsible for researching and testing advancements in maintainer technology. Operational security was deemed to be of utmost importance, and they built a base for the new force that was as proof against invasion as they could design, even making the buildings constantly rotate to prevent any unwanted links from being written. The special force of Maintainers who were headquartered there were highly trained, both physically and mentally.

Gahreesen also served a very different purpose. The larger of the two buildings had a maximum security prison built in its highest stories, which was accessed by a completely separate set of linking books. It was impossible to get from the lower parts of the building to the upper parts, and vice-versa.

Close to the Fall, the smaller of the two buildings was opened to the public, although still under strict security, to allow for the dispensing of KI devices. They were still distributing them when the Fall of D'ni put an end to the empire.

The name of the Age, Gahreesen, is a contraction of three D'ni words. Garo means "great, mighty", arēu means "to protect", and senaren means "building, structure". Thus, gah-ree-sen means a "great protective structure", or in other words, a fortress. As this is somewhat close in meaning and sound to the English "garrison", the DRC, Yeesha and some explorers have occasionally used "garrison" when writing or speaking about the Age.

Victor Laxman of the DRC was in charge of restoring Gahreesen, with assistance from Michael Engberg, who was the chief structural engineer. Engberg's job was to determine if a building or location was stable and safe enough to work in and to direct structural repairs by the restoration engineers.

Michael Simpson, a restoration engineer, assisted in the project and made several visits to study the Age. Restoration engineers were employees of the DRC who did the day to day work of restoring D'ni and its Ages enough to be safe for visitors. They did not have voting rights in the council. Simpson wrote his first impressions of Gahreesen in a notebook, with entries made between November 12, 2001 and June 4, 2002. I'm including quotes from his notebook with a darker background color in this article.

Why couldn't a linking book be written after the buildings began spinning?

This is a popular question in the yearly Cavern Tours, and it's sort of a tough question. I've spoken with Richard Watson about it, and have a few answers.

First, an Age is usually, but not always, a small part of a larger world. However, for the puposes of the D'ni, each Age is a whole. That was a fact that was drilled into Atrus' head as a child by his grandmother, Anna, a lesson he honored by naming the final refuge of the D'ni people "Releeshahn", which is the D'ni phrase that means "the whole".

Each Age is a semi-self-contained environment established by writing an excruciatingly detailed description. It had to include every facet what the writer wanted, down to the insects and kinds of dirt. Any failure to specify something left room for the link to fail, or for it to attach to a world with something unexpected in it. Even then, the writer had no way to control what the world outside the Age would be like. That was why maintainers used a heavily-armored environmental suit for the initial link to new Ages. Even after examining the linking book down to the last dot and comma, they could never known what might be waiting when they went there for the first time.

When the descriptive book was finished, it would reach out into an infinite number of worlds in an infinite number of universes, and establish a link at random to one that came the closest to matching what the descriptive book had written in it. There might have been thousands, or even millions, of worlds that closely matched the description with very minor differences from each other. Because of that, it was a random process. Another linking book written with the exact same words would link itself to a different world in a different universe.

Once an Age was established, it was a single entity as far as the D'ni Art was concerned. To write linking books to that Age, the writer would link to it either through the descriptive book or another previously written linking book, and choose the place where he wanted the new book to go. He then wrote the linking book, describing everything around him and his own position in it in minute detail. If he did the job right, the book would activate. However, the book would only activate if the person remained in that exact spot, with no change in his relationship to everything else around it.

For that reason, spinning the buildings of Gahreesen meant that a new linking book could not be written inside or on top of the buildings, because the person was no longer stationary in relation to the environment. Even in the exact center of the buildings, he was constantly turning to face new directions, which altered his spatial relationship. Because his direction always changes, he cannot describe the direction he is facing in the book. That doesn't matter for linking in, but it does for creating a link in the first place.

I have a theory as to why the Bahro version of the Art doesn't appear to have the same limitation. It seems to be more flexible because it may rely on a description of the immediate surroundings rather than one's position in the Age as a whole. Thus, when the Bahro stone to the prison cell was created, it didn't matter that the cell was moving, because they just needed a description of the cell itself.

In other words, to the D'ni, your position in the Age and your facing had to be accounted for to create a link. To the Bahro, it may have been only what you could see around you that was needed.

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