Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett [2]
The Candle Knave stared at the grey, round, guileless face. There was an unshakeably amiable look about it that was very disconcerting, especially when you knew what it was you were looking at. And he knew what it was, oh yes, but not 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 a suitably amazed Nutt.
A mountain of silvery-grey tallow almost filled the isolated junction of stone corridors. The flame of this candle, which could just be made out to be a mega-candle aggregated from the stubs of many, many thousands of candles that had gone before, all dribbled and runnelled into one great whole, was a glow near 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. Of course, 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 a slicked-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 base camp generations of Candle Knaves had carved and maintained steps up the hubward face of the giant.
‘Feast your eyes on this, lad,’ he called down, his ground-state bad temper somewhat 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 expression of 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 went away 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 was founded, and had never gone out since. Certainly the Emperor was huge, and was what you got when, every night for maybe two thousand years, you lit a new fat candle from the guttering remains of the last one and pressed it firmly into the warm wax. There was no visible candlestick now, of course. That was somewhere 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 the ceiling of the corridor below, and already the Emperor was seventeen feet high up here. There was thirty-eight feet in total of pure, natural, dribbled candle. 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, at least 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 was all of them, plus some other bits of beasts unknown to science or nightmare or even kebab. There was certainly some red, and a lot of flapping, and Nutt was sure he caught a glimpse of an enormous sandal, but there were the mad, rolling,