Unseen Academicals (Discworld 37)

'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, bouncing eyes, the huge yellow and red beak and then the thing disappeared down another gloomy corridor, incessantly making that flat honking noise of the sort duck hunters make just before they are shot by other duck hunters.

'Aho! The Megapode!' It wasn't clear where the cry came from. It seemed to be coming from everywhere. 'There she bumps! Ho, the Megapode!'

The cry was taken up on every side, and from the dark shadows of every corridor, 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 senior faculty of the university. Each wizard was being carried piggy-back by a stout bowler-hatted university porter, whom he was urging onward by means of a bottle of beer on a string held, as tradition demanded, ahead of the porter's grasp on a long stick.

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

The colliding wizardry, who'd already crushed Smeems's rickety ladder under the hobnailed boots of their steeds, set off at once, butting and barging for position.

For a little while 'Aho! The Megapode!' echoed in the distance. When he was certain 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 tool bag.

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

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