‘Actually, I quite like being a dribbler, sir—’

‘Ha! Want of ambition is the curse of the labouring class! Here, give me thatthing!’

The Candle Knave snatched at the ladder just as his luckless assistant closedit.

‘Sorry about that, sir… ’

‘There’s always room for one more on the wick-dipping tank, you know,’ saidSmeems, blowing on his knuckles.

‘Fair enough, sir.’

The Candle Knave stared at the grey, round, guileless face. There was anunshakeably amiable look about it that was very disconcerting, especially whenyou knew what it was you were looking at. And he knew what it was, oh yes, butnot what it was called.

‘What’s your name again? I can’t remember everybody’s name.’

‘Nutt, Mister Smeems. With two t’s.’

‘Do you think the second one helps matters, Nutt?’

‘Not really, sir.’

‘Where is Trev? He should be on tonight.’

‘Been very ill, sir. Asked me to do it.’

The Candle Knave grunted. ‘You have to look smart to work above stairs, Nutts!’

‘Nutt, sir. Sorry, sir. Was born not looking smart, sir.’

‘Well, at least there’s no one to see you now,’ Smeems conceded. ‘All right,follow me, and try to look less… well, just try not to look.’

‘Yes, master, but I think—’

‘You are not paid to think, young… man.’

‘Will try not to do so, master.’

Two minutes later Smeems was standing in front of the Emperor, watched by asuitably amazed Nutt.

A mountain of silvery-grey tallow almost filled the isolated junction of stonecorridors. The flame of this candle, which could just be made out to be amega-candle aggregated from the stubs of many, many thousands of candles thathad gone before, all dribbled and runnelled into one great whole, was a glownear the ceiling, too high to illuminate anything very much.

Smeems’s chest swelled. He was in the presence of History.

‘Behold, Nutts!’

‘Yes, sir. Beholding, sir. It’s Nutt, sir.’

‘Two thousand years look down on us from the top of this candle, Nutts. Ofcourse, they look further down on you than on me.’

‘Absolutely, sir. Well done, sir.’

Smeems glared at the round, amiable face, and saw nothing there but aslicked-down keenness that was very nearly frightening.

He grunted, then unfolded his ladder without much more than a pinched thumb,and climbed it carefully until it would take him no further. From this basecamp generations of Candle Knaves had carved and maintained steps up thehubward face of the giant.

‘Feast your eyes on this, lad,’ he called down, his ground-state bad tempersomewhat moderated by this contact with greatness. ‘One day you might be the…man to climb this hallowed tallow!’

For a moment, Nutt looked like someone trying hard to disguise the expressionof a person who seriously hopes that his future holds more than a big candle.Nutt was young and as such did not have that reverence for age that is had by,mostly, the aged. But the cheerful not-quite-smile came back. It never wentaway for long.

‘Yessir,’ he said, on the basis that this generally worked.

Some people claimed that the Emperor had been lit on the very night that UU wasfounded, and had never gone out since. Certainly the Emperor was huge, and waswhat you got when, every night for maybe two thousand years, you lit a new fatcandle from the guttering remains of the last one and pressed it firmly intothe warm wax. There was no visible candlestick now, of course. That wassomewhere in the vast accumulation of waxy dribbles on the next floor down.

Around a thousand years ago, the university had had a large hole made in theceiling of the corridor below, and already the Emperor was seventeen feet highup here. There was thirty-eight feet in total of pure, natural, dribbledcandle. It made Smeems proud. He was keeper of the candle that never went out.It was an example to everyone, a light that never failed, a flame in the dark,a beacon of tradition. And Unseen University took tradition very seriously, atleast when it remembered to.

As now, in fact…

From somewhere in the distance came a sound like a large duck being trodden on,followed by a cry of ‘Ho, the Megapode!’ And then all hell eventuated.

A… creature plunged out of the gloom.

There is a phrase ‘neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring’. This thing wasall of them, plus some other bits of beasts unknown to science or nightmare oreven kebab. There was certainly some red, and a lot of flapping, and Nutt wassure he caught a glimpse of an enormous sandal, but there were the mad,rolling, bouncing eyes, the huge yellow and red beak and then the thingdisappeared down another gloomy corridor, incessantly making that flat honkingnoise of the sort duck hunters make just before they are shot by other duckhunters.

‘Aho! The Megapode!’ It wasn’t clear where the cry came from. It seemed to becoming from everywhere. ‘There she bumps! Ho, the Megapode!’

The cry was taken up on every side, and from the dark shadows of everycorridor, bar the one down which the beast had fled, galloped curious shapes,which turned out to be, by the flickering light of the Emperor, the seniorfaculty of the university. Each wizard was being carried piggy-back by a stoutbowler-hatted university porter, whom he was urging onward by means of a bottleof beer on a string held, as tradition demanded, ahead of the porter’s grasp ona long stick.

The doleful quack rang out again, some distance away, and a wizard waved hisstaff in the air and yelled: ‘Bird is Flown! Ho, the Megapode!’

The colliding wizardry, who’d already crushed Smeems’s rickety ladder under thehobnailed boots of their steeds, set off at once, butting and barging forposition.

For a little while ‘Aho! The Megapode!’ echoed in the distance. When he wascertain they had gone, Nutt crept out from his refuge behind the Emperor,picked up what remained of the ladder, and looked around.

‘Master?’ he ventured.

There was a grunt from above. He looked up. ‘Are you all right, master?’

‘I have been better, Nutts. Can you see my feet?’

Nutt raised his lantern. ‘Yes, master. I’m sorry to say the ladder is broken.’

‘Well, do something about it. I’m having to concentrate on my handholds here.’

‘I thought I wasn’t paid to think, master.’

‘Don’t you try to be smart!’

‘Can I try to be smart enough to get you down safely, master?’

No answer was the stern reply. Nutt sighed, and opened up the big canvas toolbag.

Smeems clung to the vertiginous candle as he heard, down below, mysteriousscrapings and clinking noises. Then, with a silence and suddenness that madehim gasp, a spiky shape rose up beside him, swaying slightly.

‘I’ve screwed together three of the big snuffer poles, master,’ said Nutt frombelow. ‘And you’ll see there’s a chandelier hook stuck in the top, yes? Andthere’s a rope. Can you see it? I think that if you can make a loop around theEmperor it won’t slip much and you ought to be able to let yourself downslowly. Oh, and there’s a box of matches, too.’

‘What for?’ said Smeems, reaching out for the hook.

‘Can’t help noticing that the Emperor has gone out, sir,’ said the voice frombelow, cheerfully.

‘No it hasn’t!’

‘I think you’ll find it has, sir, because I can’t see the—’

‘There is no room in this university’s most important department for peoplewith bad eyesight, Nutts!’

‘I beg your pardon, master. I don’t know what came over me. Suddenly I can seethe flame!’

From above came the sound of a match being struck, and a circle of yellow lightexpanded on the ceiling as the candle that never went out was lit. Shortlyafterwards Smeems very gingerly lowered himself to the floor.

‘Well done, sir,’ said Nutt.

The Candle Knave flicked a length of congealed candle dribble off his equallygreasy shirt.