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 the