Unseen Academicals

Slab, Slice, Sleek and Slump, and who would even snort iron filings if Nutt didn’t stop him, whimpered on his mattress.
    Nutt lit a fresh candle and wound up his home-made dribbling aid. It whirred away happily, and made the flame go horizontal. He paid attention to his work. A good dribbler never turned the candle when he dribbled; candles in the wild, as it were, almost never dripped in more than one direction, which was away from the draught. No wonder the wizards liked the ones he made; there was something disconcerting about a candle that appeared to have dribbled in every direction at once. It could put a man off his stroke. *
    He worked fast, and was putting the nineteenth well-dribbled candle in the delivery basket when he heard the clank of a tin can being bowled along the stone floor of the passage.
    ‘Good morning, Mister Trev,’ he said, without looking up. A moment later an empty tin can landed in front of him, on end, with no more ceremony than a jigsaw piece falling into place.
    ‘How did you know it was me, Gobbo?’
    ‘Your leitmotif, Mister Trev. And I’d prefer Nutt, thank you.’
    ‘What’s one o’ them motifs?’ said the voice behind him.
    ‘It is a repeated theme or chord associated with a particular person or place, Mister Trev,’ said Nutt, carefully placing two more warm candles in the basket. ‘I was referring to your love of kicking a tin can about. You seem in good spirits, sir. How went the day?’
    ‘You what?’
    ‘Did Fortune favour Dimwell last night?’
    ‘What are you on about?’
    Nutt pulled back further. It could be dangerous not to fit in, not to be helpful, not to be careful. ‘Did you win , sir?’
    ‘Nah. Another no-score draw. Waste of time, really. But it was only a friendly. Nobody died.’ Trev looked at the full baskets of realistically dribbled candles.
    ‘That’s a shitload you’ve done there, kid,’ he said kindly.
    Nutt hesitated again, and then said, very carefully, ‘Despite the scatological reference, you approve of the large but unspecified number of candles that I have dribbled for you?’
    ‘Blimey, what was that all about, Gobbo?’
    Frantically, Nutt sought for an acceptable translation. ‘I done okay?’ he ventured.
    Trev slapped him on the back. ‘Yeah! Good job! Respect! But you gotta learn to speak more proper, you know. You wu’nt last five minutes down our way. You’d probably get a half-brick heaved at yer.’
    ‘That has, I mean ’ as been known to…’appen,’ said Nutt, concentrating.
    ‘I never seen why people make such a to-do,’ said Trev generously. ‘So there were all those big battles? So what? It was a long time ago and a long way away, right, an’ it’s not like the trolls and dwarfs weren’t as bad as you lot, ain’t I right? I mean, goblins? What was that all about? You lot jus’ cut throats and nicked stuff, right? That’s practically civilized in some streets round here.’
    Probably, Nutt thought. No one could have been neutral when the Dark War had engulfed Far Uberwald. Maybe there had been true evil there, but apparently the evil was, oddly enough, always on the other side. Perhaps it was contagious. Somehow, in all the confusing histories that had been sung or written, the goblins were down as nasty cowardly little bastards who collected their own earwax and were always on the other side. Alas, when the time came to write their story down, his people hadn’t even had a pencil.
    Smile at people. Like them. Be helpful. Accumulate worth . He liked Trev. He was good at liking people. When you clearly liked people, they were slightly more inclined to like you. Every little helped.
    Trev, though, seemed genuinely unfussed about history, and had recognized that having someone in the vats who not only did not try to eat the tallow but also did most of his work for him and, at that, did it better than he could be bothered to do it himself, was an asset worth protecting. Besides, he was congenially lazy, except when it came to foot-the-ball, and bigotry took too much effort. Trev never made too much effort. Trev went through life on primrose paths.
    ‘Master Smeems came looking for you,’ said Nutt. ‘I sorted it all out.’
    ‘Ta,’ said Trev, and that was that. No questions. He liked Trev.
    But the boy was standing there, just staring at him, as if trying to work him out.
    ‘Tell you what,’ Trev said. ‘Come on up to the Night Kitchen and we’ll scrounge breakfast, okay?’
    ‘Oh no,