Working for them are six Heralds, each representing a major city state: Chirm Herald, Al Khali Herald and Genua Herald (for the Rimward states) and Pseudopolis Herald, Lancre Herald and Sto Lat Herald (for the Hubward states).
The Heralds’ attendants are called Pursuivants: Pardessus Châtain Pursuivant, Croissant Vert Pursuivant, Garderobe Pursuivant and Rouge Dragon de Marais Pursuivant. Two additional officers, whose duties are unclear, are Scrote Pursuivant Extraordinary and Ankh Pursuivant Extraordinary.
All this is, however, more or less irrelevant since practically none of the above posts are in fact occupied and all the practical business of the College is now carried out by the last two remaining Pursuivants, Croissant Vert (Green Crescent) and Pardessus Châtain (Brown Overcoat), or Sid and Frank as they are known to outsiders. They still do jobbing heraldry work for those members of the rising merchant class of Ankh-Morpork which believes that having lots of dough makes you upper-crust, but spend most of their time tending the decrepit collection of heraldic animals still kept on the premises (the heraldic creatures used on shields and so on are always painted from life; one reason why so many of them are such a strange shape – legs of a lion, body of a weasel, head of an eagle and so on – may lie in the fact that in the cramped quarters of the College yard the beasts are allowed to run free and seem to get along quite well, as it were).
Most of the College records were destroyed during the events of Feet of Clay but, given the average human’s persistent desire for bits of paper proving his or her superiority over the neighbours, Sid and Frank seem to be kept busy.
Helmclever. A novice dwarf Grag, related to the Helmclevers of Tallow Lane, Ankh-Morpork. He was born in Ankh-Morpork, and went off to study in the mountains – against his parents’ wishes. He is a junior official (orders the groceries, relays orders, pays the miners, etc). He dresses as a standard city dwarf – helmet, leather, chain mail, battleaxe/mining pick, and a black sash. [T!]
Here’n’Now. An unlicensed thief and stool pigeon in Ankh-Morpork. The worst thief in the world (worst as in not good at it). A very small, raggedy man, whose beard and hair are so overgrown and matted together that he looks like a ferret peering out of a bush. Called Here’n’Now because of his nervous inability to master anything but the present tense, so that his speech is therefore on these lines: ‘So I’m standing outside the Mended Drum when who is coming up to me but Flannelfoot Boggis who tells me he is seeing where the De Bris gang are robbing the jewellers’ shop in Gleam Street, but I am reticent because I know this to be nothing but an untruth . . .’ [MAA]
Heretofore. Secretary to Cosmo LAVISH. He is a pale young man in an old-fashioned clerk’s robe. Heretofore had told Cosmo that he had been employed at the Patrician’s Palace. Indeed he had been employed for a while at the palace, but he did not let Cosmo find out that it had been as a gardener. He had been a minor secretary at the Armourers’ Guild before that, which was why he’d felt confident in saying ‘I was a minor secretary and I was employed at the palace’, a phrase that readers will recognise that Lord Vetinari would have examined with more care than the delighted Cosmo had done. [MM]
Herne the Hunted. God of all small furry creatures whose destiny it is to end life with a brief, crunchy squeak. Herne is about three feet high with long, floppy, rabbit ears and very small horns. He has an extremely good turn of speed. Found in the mountains and forests of LANCRE, moving extremely fast. [WS, LL]
Heroes. Most of the Disc’s classic heroes are from the barbaric tribes nearer the frozen Hub, which have a sort of export trade in heroes, which shows that the leaders of these tribes are by no means stupid because their sons are usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk. They tend to acquire magic swords, a forthright attitude to women, and a complete disrespect for other people’s property. Some of the Disc’s best-known heroes include COHEN the Barbarian, HRUN the Barbarian, Erig Stronginthearm [COM], Black Zenell [COM], Codice of Chimeria [COM], and Cimbar the Assassin [LF]. Stronginthearm is a dwarf name, but presumably they have heroes just like everybody else.
Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan. An adventuress. A good swordswoman who has amassed a modest fortune for a future which will certainly include a bidet if she has anything to do with it. She is usually sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots and a short sword, and would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure and the pick of the leather goods in Woo Hun Ling’s Oriental Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, Ankh-Morpork. [LF, E]
Hersheba. Small desert kingdom Rimwards of KLATCH, practically on the more-or-less vague boundary with HOWONDALAND. Said to be ruled by a queen who lives for ever.
Hex. It was, perhaps, inevitable that the combination of enthusiastic students and a disinterested faculty would lead to the creation of a machine to explore the unknown and to advance the search for knowledge. Such is the case in Unseen University and Hex, although the underlying reason for Hex’s construction is probably the same as the one which has inspired so many other technological advances: we can build this, so let’s see what it does if we do.
The official reason was the speeding up of the University’s magical throughput. There are more than 500 known spells to secure the love of another person. Enquiring minds wondered whether an analysis of all these spells might reveal some small powerful common denominator, some meta-spell, some simple little equation which would achieve the required end far more quickly.
To answer both these questions, Hex was built. Part of it is clockwork. A lot of it is a giant ant farm (the interface, where the ants ride up and down on a little paternoster that turns a significant cogwheel, is a little masterpiece). The intricately controlled rushing of the ants through their maze of glass tubing (which looks like it has been made by a glass-blower with hiccoughs) is the most important part of the whole thing. Stuff which just seemed to have accumulated included the Phase of the Moon Generator, the aquarium and the wind chimes, which now seemed to be essential. A mouse has built a nest in the middle of it all and has now been allowed to remain – indeed, Hex stopped working when the mouse had been removed.
Hex redesigns itself and, although the students assert that it was they who constructed the Unreal Time Clock (a strange wobbly thing with a cuckoo), other features now form integral parts of the machine without anyone being quite sure how they accumulated. These include: a device a bit like a wind-speed measurer, blocks with occult symbols that dropped into a hopper (although these now seem to have been replaced by a quill pen in the middle of a network of pulleys and levers, and Hex communicates in handwriting) a clothes wringer, a thing like a broken umbrella with herrings on it, some small religious pictures, a large hourglass on a spring (which shows when the machine is thinking) and a thing that goes ‘parp’. Long-term memory storage is not achieved by using beehives and, apparently, some kind of telepathic contact between the ants and the bees – placement of pollen and honey in the wax cells indicates a kind of code and, unlike more traditional forms of computer equipment, can be eaten when obsolete. Hex has now also been enhanced with a white carnival mask on one wall of its room – so that users have someone to talk to.
Hex weighs around ten tons and its gnomic bulk is operated by an enormous keyboard – almost as big as the rest of Hex. It now also houses a ram’s skull at its core, and its two most technical features are the GBL and FTB. Oh, sorry, the Great Big Lever and the Fluffy Teddy Bear – without the latter, it refuses to work at all. On its outer surface it has a sticker – ‘Anthill Inside’. No one knows why it is there, but it turned up one day. [IT, H]
Hicks, John, Professor. Head of the Department of Post-Mortem Communications at Unseen University. Well, I say Head, but that is the trouble with working in the DPMC, you could never exactly be the boss. In an ordinary job people retired, wandered back to the ol’ workplace a few times while there were people who remembered them, and then faded in to the ever swelling past. But the former staff here never seemed to go . .
. There is a saying: ‘Old Necromancers never die.’ When he tells people this, they say ‘. . . and?’ and Hicks would have to reply, ‘That’s all of it, I’m afraid. Just “Old Necromancers never die”.’
He has a widow’s peak, a skull ring, a sinister staff, a black robe – and a coffee mug with the legend – ‘Necromancers Do It All Night’. He is tolerated as a useful, if slightly irritating, member of the College Council. He looks as though he’s tried, like any self-respecting necromancer, to grow a proper goatee beard, but owing to some basic lack of malevolence it had turned out a bit sheepish.
Now spells his name ‘Hix’. Strictly speaking, Dr Hix, spelled with an ‘X’ was the son of Mr and Mrs Hicks, but a man who wears a black robe with nasty symbols on it and has a skull ring would be mad, or let us say even madder, to pass up the chance to have an ‘X’ in his name. [UA, MM]
History, nature of. (See MONKS, HISTORY.)
Hiver, the. A form of demon. Hivers were formed in the first seconds of Creation. They are not alive but they have, as it were, the shape of life. They have no body, brain or thoughts of their own and a naked hiver is a sluggish thing indeed, tumbling gently though the endless night between the worlds. Most end up at the bottom of deep seas, or in the bellies of volcanoes, or drifting through the hearts of stars. [HFOS]
Hix. See HICKS
Hobson, Willie. Willie is a thickset man and owner of Hobson’s Livery Stable in Creek Alley, Ankh-Morpork. A huge, multi-storey building. Hobson found a niche and occupied it. Many people in Ankh-Morpork occasionally needed a horse, but hardly anyone has somewhere to park one, or the money for the stable, groom, hayloft . . . To hire a horse from Willie you just needed a few dollars. Lots of people rent space to keep their own horses there, too. Hobson’s Livery Stable is at once the most famous and notorious such establishment in the city. It is probably not the hive of criminal activity that popular rumour suggests, although the huge establishment often seems to contain grubby looking men with not much to do apart from sit around and squint at people. And Willie now employs an Igor, which of course is sensible when you have such a high veterinary overhead, but you hear stories – such as, for example, stolen horses got dismantled at dead of night and might well turn up with a dye job and two different legs. And it was said that there was one horse in Ankh-Morpork that had a longitudinal seam from head to tail, being sewn together from what was left of two horses that had been involved in a particularly nasty accident. [TT, GP, etc.]
Hodgesaargh. Castle falconer at LANCRE. Hodgesaargh is not his original name, but he is regularly attacked by his birds just as you speak to him, and this has led to a common misunderstanding. An amiable, good-natured man, whose love and care for his charges is only surpassed by their own fervent desire to eat his eyeballs. He is not a bad falconer, in fact he’s one of the best trainers in the mountains. His personality tends towards the one-man feudal system; he doesn’t disagree with his betters and he doesn’t mind who runs the castle as long as they don’t tamper with his birds. As the official Royal Falconer he is entitled to wear a ceremonial costume, which was designed hundreds of years previously by someone with a lyrical view of the countryside. It includes a lot of red and gold, with a big, red floppy hat with a feather in it. The whole outfit would look much better on someone two feet taller and who has the legs for red stockings. Usually, however, he wears working leathers and about three sticking plasters. [LL]
Hogfather, the. Now, at least, the Hogfather is kind old gentleman with whiskers and boots who arrives, to the sound of hog bells, with a sack of toys on HOGSWATCHNIGHT. Children leave out a glass of wine and a pork pie for him, and they decorate their houses with an oak tree in a pot and strings of paper sausages; on Hogswatchday they wear paper hats while they eat their pork dinner.
However, this is a light modern version of a darker myth. The original Hogfather is a winter god who was associated with the pig-killing that is customary in country districts in the month before Hogswatchnight. According to legend – at least in those areas where pigs are a vital part of the household economy – the Hogfather spends the year in his secret palace of giant pig bones, emerging on Hogswatchnight to gallop from house to house on a crude sledge drawn by four tusked wild boars to deliver presents of sausages, black puddings, pork scratchings and ham to all the children who have been good. He says ‘Ho Ho Ho’ a lot. Children who have been bad get a bag full of bloody bones (it’s these little details that tell you it’s a tale for children). There is a song about him, which includes the line: ‘You’d Better Watch Out . . .’
The kinder version of the Hogfather is said to have originated in the legend of a local king who, one winter’s night, happened to be passing, or so he said, the home of three young women and heard them sobbing because they had no food to celebrate the midwinter feast. He took pity on them and threw a packet of sausages through the window – badly concussing one of them, but there’s no point in spoiling a good legend.
However, it is clear that the root of the story goes back much, much further, to those bloody and often abrupt ceremonies that were once thought necessary to give the sun a nudge in the darkest times of the year.
His sledge is drawn by his four boars: Gouger, Rooter, Tusker and Snouter. They are not your average cuddly piggies.
Hogswatchnight. The one night of the Disc’s long year when witches are expected to stay at home. Occurs at the turn of the Disc year. By tradition, shops do not open on Hogswatchday. It’s generally the occasion for festivities of a let’s-get-the-whole-family-together-and-have-a-row nature, at which otherwise sane people may occasionally blow squeakers.
Hoki (Hoki the Jokester). A nature god in the RAMTOPS. He manifests himself as an oak tree, or as half-man and half-goat, or in his most common aspect as a bloody nuisance. He is found only in deep woods and likes to haunt the Ramtops. Hoki was banished from DUNMANIFESTIN for pulling the old exploding mistletoe joke on BLIND IO.
Hollow, Desiderata. A fairy godmother, which is a very specialised form of witch. A kindly and intelligent soul, who lived in LANCRE. Although blind for thirty years, she was blessed or possibly cursed with second sight and always saw what she was doing just before she did it.
Her cottage was stuffed with old books, maps and curios from Foreign Parts. Her friendship with Magrat GARLICK, who has rather more respect for book learning than her fellow witches, led to Magrat inheriting her magic wand and, directly, the confrontation between the WEATHERWAX sisters. [WA]
Holy Wood. A wind-blown old forest, a temple and some sand dunes about thirty miles turnwise of Ankh-Morpork, on a sun-drenched spit of land where the CIRCLE SEA meets the Rim Ocean. There is a legend that a city on the site was destroyed by the gods for some unspeakable crime against them or mankind, and given what the gods (and mankind) get up to all the time without any kind of punishment at all, it must have been something pretty awful.
For a while, Holy Wood was the focus for creatures from the DUNGEON DIMENSIONS, who tried to use the magic of the area to break into the real world during the time that moving pictures were being made there. [MP]
Hong, Lord. Grand Vizier of the Agatean Empire until his death at the age of twenty-six. He rose to the leadership of one of the most influential families of the Agatean Empire by relentless application, total focusing of his mental powers and six well-executed deaths (including that of his own father). Like all Grand Viziers he was power-obsessed and pathologically intelligent. There just seems to be something about the job. [IT]
Hong, Mr. (No relation, as far as is known.) Owner of the short-lived Three Jolly Luck Take-Away Fish Bar, which was built on the site of an old temple on Dagon Street and opened at the time of the full moon. No one really knows what happened to him in that terrible five minutes just after he opened for business, but he was certainly removed from the world so quickly that he had to leave some things behind. They were things you wouldn’t expect to leave behind. [MAA]
Hopkins, Chickenwire. A farmer in the Ramtops who once th
rew a rock at Granny Weatherwax just after she’d helped a local troll. Soon afterwards his barns were mysteriously flattened one night. [WA]
Hopkins, Dr. Secretary of the Clockmakers’ Guild. He is a middle-aged, bespectacled, sheep-faced man who likes to see the best in everybody. Although apparently as mild-mannered as milk, he has survived several years as Guild Secretary, so he must have hidden depths. He has a workshop several streets away from Jeremy CLOCKSON’S, where he makes novelty watches for a rather strange kind of discerning customer. [TOT]
Hopkinson. One-time Curator of the Ankh-Morpork Dwarf Bread Museum in Whirligig Alley. He was not himself a dwarf, being a tall man with a white beard and a squeaky voice. He wore his spectacles on a length of black tape – the sure sign of a dangerously tidy mind. He wrote the definitive work on offensive bakery and was himself, ironically enough and much to his subsequent annoyance, beaten to death with a loaf of bread. [FOC]
Horace. A Lancre Blue Cheese made, and owned, by Tiffany. Horace is largely blue and black on the outside and he is probably the only cheese in the multiverse who moves around, mutters and eats mice. He is now an honorary Nac Mac Feegle. [W, ISWM]
Horsefry, Crispin. Of the Ankh-Morpork Credit Bank, and once on the board of the Grand Trunk Company. He acquired other people’s money in a safe, secret and not very clever way.
He is a youngish man, who favours pink shirts. He is not simply running to fat, but vaulting, leaping and diving towards obesity. Even at the young age of thirty, he had acquired an impressive selection of chins. It is wrong, though, to judge by appearances. Despite his expression, which was of a piglet having a bright idea, and his mode of speech, which might put you in mind of a small, breathless, neurotic but ridiculously expensive dog, Mr Horsefry might well have been a kind, generous and pious man. In the same way, the man climbing out of your window in a stripey jumper, a mask and a great hurry might merely be lost on the way to a fancy-dress party, and the man in the wig and robes at the focus of the courtroom might only be a transvestite who wandered in out of the rain. Snap judgements can be so unfair. [GP]
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