‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But you’ll have to come back in the morning to recoverthe—’ But Nutt was already going up the rope like a spider. There was aclanging on the other side of the great candle as the lengths of snuffer polewere dropped, and then the boy abseiled back down to his master with the hookunder his arm. And now he stood there all eagerness and scrubbed (if somewhatbadly dressed) efficiency. There was something almost offensive about it. Andthe Candle Knave wasn’t used to this. He felt obliged to take the lad down apeg, for his own good.

‘All candles in this university must be lit by long taper from a candle thatstill burns, boy,’ he said sternly. ‘Where did you get those matches?’

‘I wouldn’t like to say, sir.’

‘I dare say you wouldn’t, indeed! Now tell me, boy!’

‘I don’t want to get anyone into trouble, master.’

‘Your reluctance does you credit, but I insist,’ said the Candle Knave.

‘Er, they fell out of your jacket when you were climbing up, master.’

Off in the distance was one last cry: ‘The Megapode is catched!’ But around theEmperor silence listened with its mouth open.

‘You are mistaken, Nutts,’ said Smeems slowly. ‘I think you will find that oneof the gentlemen must have dropped them.’

‘Ah, yes, that’s certainly what must have happened, sir. I must learn not tojump to conclusions.’

Once again, the Candle Knave had that off-balance feeling. ‘Well, then, we willsay no more about it,’ was all he managed.

‘What was it that happened just then, sir?’ said Nutt.

‘Oh, that? That was all part of one of the gentlemen’s magically essentialmagical activities, lad. It was vital to the proper running of the world, I’llbe bound, oh yes. Could be they was setting the stars in their courses, even.It’s one of them things we have to do, you know,’ he added, carefullyinsinuating himself into the company of wizardry.

‘Only it looked like a skinny man with a big wooden duck strapped to his head.’

‘Ah, well, it may have looked like that, come to think of it, but that wasbecause that’s how it looks to people like us, what are not gifted with theocular sight.’

‘You mean it was some sort of metaphor?’

Smeems handled this quite well in the circumstances, which included being sodeeply at sea with that sentence that barnacles would be attracted to hisunderwear. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It could be a meta for something thatdidn’t look so stupid.’

‘Exactly, master.’

Smeems looked down at the boy. It’s not his fault, he thought, he can’t helpwhat he is. An uncharacteristic moment of warmth overtook him.

‘You’re a bright lad,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be headdribbler one day.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Nutt, ‘but if you don’t mind I was rather hoping forsomething a bit more in the fresh air, so to speak.’

‘Ah,’ said Smeems, ‘that could be a bit… tricky, as you might say.’

‘Yes, sir. I know.’

‘It’s just that there’s a lot of—well, look, it’s not me, it’s… it’s… well, youknow. It’s people. You know what people are like.’

‘Yes. I know what people are like.’

Looks like a scarecrow, talks posh like one of the gentlemen, Smeems thought.Bright as a button, grubby as a turd. He felt moved to pat the little… fellowon his curiously spherical head, but desisted.

‘Best if you stay down in the vats,’ he said. ‘It’s nice and warm, you’ve gotyour own bedroll, and it’s all snug and safe, eh?’

To his relief the boy was silent as they walked down the passages, but thenNutt said, in a thoughtful tone of voice, ‘I was just wondering, sir… How oftenhas the candle that never goes out… not gone out?’

Smeems bit back the stinging retort. For some reason he knew it could onlybuild up trouble in the long run.

‘The candle that never goes out has failed to go out three times since I’vebeen Candle Knave, lad,’ he said. ‘It’s a record!’

‘An enviable achievement, sir.’

‘Damn right! And that’s even with all the strangeness there’s been happeninglately.’

‘Really, sir?’ said Nutt. ‘Have stranger than usual things been happening?’

‘Young… man, stranger than usual things happen all the time.’

‘One of the scullery boys told me that all the toilets on the Tesseracticalfloor turned into sheep yesterday,’ said Nutt. ‘I should like to see that.’

‘I shouldn’t go further than the sculleries, if I was you,’ said Smeems,quickly. ‘And don’t worry about what the gentlemen do. They are the finestminds in the world, let me tell you. If you was to ask ’em… ’ He paused, tryingto think of something really difficult, like, ‘What is 864 times 316… ?’

‘273,024,’ said Nutt, not quite under his breath.

‘What?’ said Smeems, derailed.

‘Just thinking aloud, master,’ said Nutt.

‘Oh. Right. Er… Well that’s it, see? They’d have an answer for you in a braceof shakes. Finest minds in the world,’ said Smeems, who believed in truth viarepetition. ‘Finest minds. Engaged in the business of the universe. Finestminds!’

‘Well, that was fun,’ said Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of the university,throwing himself into a huge armchair in the faculty’s Uncommon Room with suchforce that it nearly threw him out again. ‘We must do it again some time.’

‘Yes, sir. We will. In one hundred years,’ said the new Master of TheTraditions smugly, turning over the pages in his huge book. He reached thecrackling leaf headed Hunting the Megapode, wrote down the date and the amountof time it had taken to find the aforesaid Megapode, and signed his name with aflourish: Ponder Stibbons.

‘What is a Megapode, anyway?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, helpinghimself to the port.

‘A type of bird, I believe,’ said the Archchancellor, waving a hand towards thedrinks trolley. ‘After me.’

‘The original Megapode was found in the under-butler’s pantry,’ said the Masterof The Traditions. ‘It escaped in the middle of dinner and caused what mypredecessor eleven hundred years ago called… ’ he referred to the book, ‘“averitable heyhoe-rumbelow as all the Fellows pursued it through the collegebuildings with much mirth and good spirits”.’

‘Why?’ said the head of the Department of Post-Mortem Communications, deftlysnatching the decanter full of good spirits as it went past.

‘Oh, you can’t have a Megapode running around loose, Doctor Hix,’ saidRidcully. ‘Anyone’ll tell you that.’

‘No, I meant why do we do it again every hundred years?’ said the head of theDepartment of Post-Mortem Communications[3].

The Senior Wrangler turned his face away and murmured, ‘Oh, good gods… ’

‘It’s a tradition,’ the Chair of Indefinite Studies explained, rolling acigarette. ‘We have to have traditions.’

‘They’re traditional,’ said Ridcully. He beckoned to one of the servants. ‘AndI don’t mind saying that this one has made me somewhat peckish. Can you fetchthe cheeseboards one to five, please? And, um, some of that cold roast beef,some ham, a few biscuits and, of course, the pickle carts.’ He looked up.‘Anyone want to add anything?’

‘I could toy fitfully with a little fruit,’ said the Professor of ReconditePhenomena. ‘How about you, Librarian?’

‘Ook,’ growled the figure hogging the fire.

‘Yes, of course,’ said the Archchancellor. He waved a hand at the hoveringwaiter. ‘The fruit trolley as well. See to it, please, Downbody. And… perhapsthat new girl could bring it up? She ought to get used to the Uncommon Room.’

It was as if he had just spoken a magic spell. The room, its ceiling hazy withblue smoke, was suddenly awash with a sort of heavy, curiously preoccupiedsilence mostly due to dreamy speculation, but in a few rare cases owing todistant memory.

The new girl… At the mere thought, elderly hearts beat dangerously.