Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion ... So Far

by Terry Pratchett

  Cripple Mr Onion. Very complex card game played with great intensity on the Disc. Winning combinations include: Two Card Onion, Broken Flush, Three Card Onion, Double Bagel, a Five Card Onion, a Double Onion, a Triple Onion (three kings and three aces) and a Great Onion, which is unbeatable except with a perfect nine-card run. If you are unable to tell 1 from 11 you may lose money playing Cripple Mr Onion. It is one of those games the learning of which costs a very great deal of money.

  Cripslock, Sacharissa. Granddaughter of an engraver in the Street of Cunning Artificers. She wears a wedding ring, but is definitely a ‘Miss’. She is not particularly attractive, but not particularly bad-looking either. In fact she is quite good-looking if considered over several centuries. Her eyes, chin, nose and ears were all classically beautiful, in different centuries. Mind you, she also has a well-crafted supply of features that never go out of fashion at all and are perfectly at home in any century. She believes that severe, old-fashioned dresses tone these down. They do not.

  She suffers from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistakes, in fact, mannerisms for manners although, since becoming the first reporter on the Ankh-Morpork Times, her approach to life has been a little more down-to-disc.

  Sacharissa has blond hair, which she wears in a bag net, with a small and quietly fashionable hat perched on top of her head to no particular purpose. She often carries a large shoulder bag.

  A member of the Cripslock family is also employed as a typesetter at Goatberger’s publishing house. [TT, M!!!!!]

  Cruces, Dr. Head tutor at the ASSASSINS’ GUILD in Ankh-Morpork in TEPPIC’S day. Later became Master of Assassins. A lean figure, with a soft voice. Came to a bad end in complex circumstances. [P, MAA]

  Crundells. The Ramkin country home just up the road from Ham on Rye. About twenty miles downriver from Hangnail, and Ankh-Morpork is a full day’s coach journey away. The house is usually called Ramkin Hall. A well-appointed house or, as Vimes might style it, a freezing pile that could house a regiment. [SN]

  Cuckoo, Clock-building. Lives in the RAMTOPS. It builds clocks to nest in, as a part of its courtship ritual. There is nothing very wonderful about this and it does not, emphatically, suggest that the universe was created according to any kind of Divine plan. After all, the clocks are not very good and some of them lose as many as five minutes a day. [RM]

  Cuddy, Acting-Constable. First (genetic) dwarf member of the Ankh-Morpork City WATCH. One glass eye, the usual dwarfish steel-capped boots, and a tendency to use his battle axe rather than the official truncheon. A keen dwarf, sorely missed. [MAA]

  Cumber, Miss. Teaches Language at the Quirm College for the Daughters of Gentlefolk. [SM}

  Cumberbatch, Silas. Used to be a town crier in Ankh-Morpork. Now a member of the WATCH. Has a voice that can be heard three streets away, and no neighbours. [MAA]

  Cunning Man, the. He was a witchfinder, some 1000 years before the Discworld ‘now’. He was an Omnian priest who was so mad that he wouldn’t have been able to see sanity with a telescope. His rage lived on after his death – like an idea, whose time came during the events of I Shall Wear Midnight. When he appears, his face has empty eye holes . . . He later takes over the body of a condemned prisoner called Mackintosh. [ISWM]

  Cupidor, Mme. Mistress of Mad King Soup II of Lancre. Owner of one of the world’s most complex wigs, which included a small takeaway linguini shop. [LL]

  Curiosity, Cabinet of. It is kept in a room in Unseen University. The room is bigger than it ought to be. No room ought to be more than a mile across, especially when, outside in the corridor, it appears to have perfectly normal rooms on either side of it. It shouldn’t have a ceiling so high that you can’t see it, either. It simply should not fit. Technically it appears to be a classic Bag of Holding but with n mouths, where n is the number of items in an eleven dimensional universe that are not currently alive, not pink and can fit in a cubical drawer 14.14 inches on a side, divided by P (unknown). The wizards don’t know what it’s for or who built it. Nothing in it is bigger than about fourteen inches square, but they don’t know why this is or who it is who decides they are curious, or why, and they certainly don’t know why it contains nothing pink. Anything taken out of it has to be returned in 14.14 hours recurring. When it closes up, its drawers slam in on themselves far too fast for the human eye to follow as the edifice shrinks and folds and slides and rattles down into house size, shed size and, finally, in the middle of the huge space it becomes a small polished cabinet, about a foot and a half on a side, standing on four beautifully carved legs. [UA]

  Curious Squid. These are found only in the seas around the drowned land of LESPH. Very small, harmless and difficult to find. It is their curiosity which is the curious thing about them; they seem to take a lot of interest in any new thing which enters their world. Since often the ‘new things’ are nets, hooks and tridents, this demonstrates that curiosity is only the handmaiden of intelligence, and does not work very well as its replacement. Curious Squid taste absolutely foul and therefore sell for quite high prices in certain eating-houses in Ankh-Morpork. Skilled chefs make dishes containing no squid at all.

  Currency. The ‘hardest’ currency on Discworld (outside the AGATEAN EMPIRE) is the Ankh-Morpork dollar (one hundred pennies equals one dollar; in addition, ancient tradition says that ten pence is one shilling, twenty-five pence is half a ton, fifty pence is a nob/a ton/half a bar/a knocker).

  The sequin-sized dollars are theoretically made of gold but the metal has been adulterated so often over recent years that, technically, there is more gold in an equivalent weight of sea water. In a sense, then, Ankh-Morpork is on the gold standard in all respects except the one of actually having any gold to speak of.

  But Ankh-Morpork is, despite superficialities, a stable city. It is also, despite more superficialities, a rich one. Its dollar is therefore the currency of choice throughout the lands washed by the CIRCLE SEA. Other city states have their own currencies but it is wise to ensure that these are firmly linked to the dollar, because Ankh-Morpork is the only place with anything worth buying.

  These trailing currencies include the Ephebian derechmi (fifty cercs equals one derechmi), the Djelibeybian talent (worth one Ankh-Morpork penny) and the Omnian obol. The smallest denomination coin is the Zchloty leaden quarter iotum, which is worth less than the lead it is made of.

  In the Agatean Empire, where gold is as plentiful as copper, the basic unit of currency is the rhinu. The rate of exchange with the dollar has never been officially established, other than to say that a handful of rhinu would significantly increase the amount of gold in circulation in the whole of the STO PLAINS.

  The unit of currency in LANCRE is the Lancre penny, which weighs more than an ounce. Money is not much used in that country; currency is, in any case, only a universally accepted IOU, and Lancre is small enough for everyone to remember what they owe and are owed. The fact that they choose not to, and spend much of their time in highly enjoyable rows, is just part of civic life and whiles away the long winter evenings.

  Curry, Annabel. Nine-year-old orphan of Corporal Curry of the City WATCH, whose upbringing was secretly paid for by Captain VIMES. [MAA]

  Curry Gardens. Klatchian eating house in Ankh-Morpork. On the corner of God Street and Blood Alley. The sign on the back door reads: ‘Curry Gardens. Kitchren Entlance. Keep Out. Ris Means You.’ Like immigrant restaurateurs the world over, the owners have found that if you can cause the customers to laugh at your spelling, they’ll be too amused to examine your maths. [M]

  Cutangle. Past ARCHCHANCELLOR of Unseen University and Archmage of the Silver Star. An eighth-level wizard. He was very fat, with waggly jowls and extensive stomach regions, although in all conscience we must admit that this could be just about any wizard. In his youth, he knew Esme Weatherwax, who lived in a neighbouring village. He was the first Archchancellor to admit a woman to Unseen University. [ER]

  Cutangle, Acktur. Father
of Cutangle, the Archchancellor ( see above ). Used to live in a big house under Leaping Mountain. [ER]

  Cutwell, Igneous. A young wizard in Wall Street, STO LAT. Cutwell is twenty years old when first encountered, with curly hair and no beard. He is basically good-humoured, with a round, rather plump face – pink and white like a pork pie.

  When we first met him he is wearing a grubby hooded robe with frayed edges and a pointy hat which has seen better days. He lodges in a very untidy house with peeling plaster, and a blackened brass plaque by the door – ‘Igneous Cutwell, D.M. (Unseen), Marster of the Infinit, Illuminartus, Wyzard to Princes, Gardian of the Sacred Portalls, If Out leave Maile with Mrs Nugent Next Door’. On the door is a heavy knocker that talks – a common bit of flammery used by a wizard to impress the customers.

  Cutwell enjoys food, although not to the point of actually cooking any; he grazes, more or less on whatever seems to be available when the cupboards are rummaged at 3 a.m. When he was made Royal Recogniser, with a salary and a much better wardrobe, this tendency towards indiscriminate eating of anything vaguely organic and stationary meant his highly decorated clothing achieved even greater degrees of decoration.

  He was later promoted, by Queen KELI, to Wizard First Grade of STO LAT, and Ipississimuss. This is an important wizarding distinction that is only ever written down and never said aloud owing to the trouble this can cause among non-swimmers. [M]

  Cyril. Myopic cockerel with a poor memory and dyslexia (as in ‘Lock-a-doodle-flod!). Lives on Miss FLITWORTH’S farm. [RM]

  Dactylos, Goldeneyes Silverhand. The world is divided into those who can, and those who can afford to employ those who can. Unfortunately, the latter category often gets very jealous of its employees. History is full of the tragic stories of craftsmen who are killed or disabled or imprisoned by their masters to stop them running off and making something even better for someone else – people like Daedalus, Wayland Smith, and Hephaistos. Their Discworld cousin never knew when to give up. He made the Metal Warriors that guard the tomb of Pitchiu (for which he was given much gold and had his eyes put out and replaced with golden ones). He designed the Light Dams of the Great NEF (for which he was loaded with fine silks, and was then hamstrung so that he could not escape – but in fact he did escape, in a silk and bamboo flying machine). He built the Palace of the Seven Deserts (for which he was showered with silver and had his right hand cut off and replaced with a mechanical silver hand). He finally built the POTENT VOYAGER, the vessel intended for lowering over the Rim from KRULL (for which he was killed by the ARCH-ASTRONOMER). It would seem that his ingenuity lacked some vital facets in the area of self-preservation. [COM]

  Dancers, the. Eight stones in a circle in the RAMTOPS. Each stone is about man-height and barely thicker than a fat man.

  They are not shaped or positioned in any significant way; someone has just dragged eight rocks into a rough circle, wide enough to throw a stone across. Made of thunderbolt iron, they look as if long ago they were melted and formed into their current shapes. Three of the stones have names: the first two are the Piper and the Drummer; the third is the Leaper, and no one in Lancre has yet been unfortunate enough to find out why.

  To find them you must follow an overgrown path up to the moorland, a few miles from the town of LANCRE. People say that when it starts to rain, the rain always falls inside the circle a few seconds after it falls outside, as if the rain were coming from further away. Also, when clouds cross the sun, the light inside the circle fades a moment or two after the light outside. It is apparent that the meteoric iron of the stones contains magnetism, a very minor and little-understood form of energy on the Discworld. Because of this, the stones form a barrier between the human world and the world of the lords and ladies. (See ELVES.) [LL]

  Dances. Four dances are referred to in specific terms:

  Gathering Peasecods and Gathering Sweet Lilacs. Both folk dances, but they are somewhat emasculated versions, since they are danced by the members of the Ankh-Morpork Folk Dance Society. Anything with ‘folk’ in it will refer, sooner or later, to sex.

  Serpent Dance. A quaint Morporkian folkway which consists of getting rather drunk, holding the waist of the person in front, and then wobbling and giggling uproariously in a long crocodile that winds through as many rooms as possible, preferably one with breakables, while kicking one leg vaguely in time with the beat, or at least in time with some beat.

  The Lancre Stick and Bucket Dance. A folk dance, shrouded in ancient mystery. Shouldn’t be done when there are women present (in case of sexual morrisment); it is danced to the folk tune ‘Mrs Widgery’s Lodger’.

  Dangerous Beans. The de facto spiritual leader of the Clan, a tribe of rats who developed intelligence after, apparently, scavenging food off Unseen University’s rubbish dump. He is an albino – snow-white and with pinky eyes – and is very short-sighted, although he can tell the difference between dark and light. [TAMAHER]

  Dark Clerks. Mostly scholarship boys at the ASSASSINS’ GUILD. A group of little men in black suits and bowler hats who work for Lord Vetinari.

  Dark Light is the light absorbed by Über-waldean Deep Cave Land Eels, in the same way that Discworld salamanders absorb normal light. Dark light is not darkness, exactly, but the light within darkness. It is heavier than normal light, so most of it is under the sea or in really deep caves in Überwald. There is, however, always a little of it present even in normal darkness. It is said that dark light is the original light from which all other light evolved, and it is a light without time – what it illuminates may not necessarily be what is here now.

  Darktan. Another rat clan member. A big, lean and tough rat with a scarred muzzle and a large red scar around his waist from a near-miss in a rat trap. As the leader of the Trap Disposal Squad, he spends his time taking traps apart to see how they work. He wears a network of belts with pockets, incorporating a range of tools and a sword, and is the undisputed expert on all makes of trap. A thoughtful rat, who wondered a lot about how the world works – especially those bits of it with springs. [TAMAHER]

  D’Arrangement, Lady Volentia. A thin, quite useless but good-natured high-born lady, who was fated to be a guest at a ball in Genua when Granny Weatherwax needed to borrow a dress and wig in a hurry. [WA]

  Dblah, Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off. Purveyor in OMNIA of suspiciously new holy relics, suspiciously old rancid sweetmeats on a stick, gritty figs and long-past-the-sell-by dates. Sidling everywhere and wearing the djellaba of the desert tribes, Dblah’s nickname comes from his catch phrase: ‘And at that price, I’m cutting me own hand off’. It is clear that he is a distant cousin, alter ego, psychic double or soma-type of the even more famous Cut-Me-Own-Throat DIBBLER. [SG]

  Dean, the. One-time Dean of Unseen University, now known to be called Henry. He is now Archchancellor of Brazeneck University. He joined UU on the same day as Mustrum RIDCULLY.

  Dearheart, Adora Belle. A tall young woman in a tight grey woollen dress, with coal-black hair plastered down so that she looks like a peg doll, and forced into a tight bun at the back. She smokes cigarettes as if she has a grudge aganst them, sucking the smoke down and blowing it out almost immediately. She holds her cigarettes at shoulder height, the elbow of her left arm cupped in her right hand.

  There is a definite sense that she is barely holding down an entire womanful of anger.

  Her father, Robert Dearheart, was Chairman of the original Grand Trunk (clacks) Company. Her brother, John, was allegedly killed by a fall from a clacks tower. His nickname for her was Killer – though MOIST VON LIPWIG now calls her Spike. Adora Belle lives with her aunt in Dolly Sisters.

  She used to work at the Cabbage Growers’ Co-operative Bank in Sto Lat. She was fired for letting through four forged cheques which, we later learn, were passed by Lipwig. [GP, MM]

  Death. The Defeater of Empires, the Swallower of Oceans, the Thief of Years, the Ultimate Reality, the Harvester of Mankind, the Assassin against Whom No Lock Will Hold, the only friend of the
poor and the best doctor for the mortally wounded. An anthropomorphic personification. Almost the oldest creature in the universe (obviously something had to die first ).

  He is a seven-foot-tall skeleton of polished bone, in whose eye sockets there are tiny points of light (usually blue). He normally wears a robe apparently woven of absolute darkness – and sometimes also a riding cloak fastened with a silver brooch bearing his own personal monogram, the Infinite Omega. He smells, not unpleasantly, of the air in old, forgotten rooms.

  Death’s scythe looks normal enough, except for the blade, which is so thin you can see through it – a pale blue shimmer that could slice flame and chop sound. His sword has the same ice-blue, shadow-thin blade, of the extreme thinness necessary to separate body from soul.

  His face, of necessity, is frozen into a calcareous grin. His voice is felt rather than heard. He is seen only by cats, professional practitioners of magic, and those who are about to die or are already dead – although there is some evidence that he can be glimpsed by those in a heightened state of awareness, a not uncommon state given the Discworld’s normal alarums. When he needs to communicate with the living (i.e. those who are going to continue living) he is perceived very vaguely by them in some form that does not disturb them. There was a period when he made an effort to appear in whatever form the client expected (scarab beetles, black dragons, and so on). This foundered because it was usually impossible to know what the client was expecting until after they were dead. He decided that, since no one ever really expected to die anyway, he might as well please himself and he henceforth stuck to the familiar black-cowled robe.

  His horse, though pale as per traditional specification, is entirely alive and called BINKY. Death once tried a skeleton horse after seeing a woodcut of himself on one – Death is easily influenced by that sort of thing – but he had to keep stopping to wire bits back on. The fiery steed that he tried next used to set fire to the stables.