Magicians. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘wizards’, but strictly speaking true magicians are mere magical technologists with defiant beards and leather patches on their elbows, who congregate in small groups at parties. Mostly they are failed students of Unseen University, who have nevertheless opted to stay on the fringes of the profession, where they perform menial but essential tasks such as setting up equipment, obtaining magical supplies, and so on. They carry out pretty much the same ‘lab tech’ functions for wizards as people called Igor do for pioneering brain surgeons.
But even magicians can look down on CONJURERS. [ER]
Makepeace, Colonel Charles Augustus. Late of the Light Dragoons, and married to Letitia for fifty-five years. Lives close by Ramkin Hall. Chas (as his friends know him) had long ago, with the expertise of a lifelong strategist, decided to let Letitia have her way in all things. It saved so much trouble and left him able to potter around in his garden, take care of his dragons and to occasionally go trout fishing, a pastime that he loved. He rented half a mile of stream, but was sadly now finding it difficult to keep running fast enough. Nowadays he spends a lot of time in his library, working on the second volume of his memoirs, keeping from under his wife’s feet and not getting involved. [SN]
Malachite, Tubul de. A wizard, and a great student of dragon lore. Author of The Summoning of Dragons. Died in a mysterious fire which left half his workshop completely melted. There were the tracks of something like a large wading bird in the ashes, and on the charred wall someone had apparently painted an outline of a wizard with his hands upraised protectively. This was put down to sunspot activity. [GG]
Maladict. A volunteer to the Borogravian army, who ends up promoted to Corporal. Maladict is a vampire (a black ribboner), with long canine teeth; short and quite slim, and dressed in black – expensively, like an aristocrat. Maladict carries a small sword. Maladict’s vampiric energy is now focused on caffeine and he is very fond of coffee! Close friends also call him Maladicta. [MR]
Malich, Alberto. Albert. DEATH’S manservant, but also Alberto Malich the Wise, the founder of Unseen University (1222-89 by the city count of that time).
Although in real years he is only about sixty-seven, he has been alive while two thousand years have passed on the Disc.
The generally held belief is that Alberto, one of the most powerful wizards alive at the time, tried to outwit Death by performing the Rite of ASHKENTE backwards. Insofar as his charred notebooks hold any clue, he seemed to believe that he could obtain another sixty-seven years of life.
In fact he disappeared, apart from his hat. Unseen University tradition is that he blew himself into the DUNGEON DIMENSION, which is the usual destination of those whose magic gets out of control; in reality, he ended up alive in Death’s own country. The price of immortality, it turns out, was immortality. As explained elsewhere, real time does not pass in Death’s house; there is, instead, a sort of endlessly recycled day.
It seems, however, that this entirely suits someone like Albert. Endless days filled with the same routine are something that makes a University wizard feel entirely at home. And he is, after all, a hierarchical creature. Wizards usually are.
Back on the Disc, Albert would have had only 91 days, 3 hours and 5 minutes left to live. That is now down to a handful of seconds, since most of it has been frittered away on shopping trips and holidays back in the world. When in Ankh-Morpork, Albert stays at the Young Men’s Reformed Cultists of the Ichor God Bel-Shamharoth Association, where he nicks the soap and towels (Death has not got the knack of making towels, or soap, or anything to do with plumbing).
In appearance, Albert is a small hunched old man. This merely shows that first impressions can be wrong. Second impressions suggest quite a tall, wiry man who merely walks like the third illustration Margolotta, Lady along in the usual How Man Evolved diagram. He has a red nose which drips so much that people talking to him blow their own noses out of sympathy.
Malik, Nudger. A late member of the Klatchian Foreign Legion. [SM]
Maltoon, Skully. (Sometimes known as Muldoon; spelling is not an exact science in Ankh-Morpork.) A member of the Palace guard. He used to live in Mincing Street with his mother, who made cough sweets. She died one day in a freak accident involving a wet floor, the cat, and a vat of the basic mixture for Mrs M.’s Expectorant Lozenges (‘Don’t They Make You Want to Spit’). Although she was subsequently pulled out there were nasty rumours that the family didn’t want to waste the mixture and sold the lozenges anyway, so Skully grew up under cruel street taunts like ‘Hey, these sweets have got some body in them’ and ‘There’s a button in mine’. Lives in Easy Street. [GG]
Manickle, ‘Shufti’. A volunteer to the Borogravian Army and a close friend to ‘lofty’ TEWT. Stocky, running to plump. One of those people who bustle about being helpful in a mildly annoying way, taking over small jobs that you wouldn’t have minded doing yourself. He is also known as Betty, is quite a good cook and she joined the army to find her fiancé, Johnny. She joined the army from the Girls’ Working School, Munz. [MR]
Mante, Bay of. Scene of a famous shipwreck. [M]
Maps. Map-making has never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tend to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that they often forget to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all.
Ankh-Morpork has, of course, been mapped. It is a mercantile city, after all, and people getting lost wastes time and money.
Marchesa. A fifth-level (female) wizard who commanded the flying lens which transported RINCEWIND and TWOFLOWER to KRULL. She is a woman with skin as black as the deep black of midnight at the bottom of a cave. Her hair and eyebrows are the colour of moonlight, with the same pale sheen about her lips. A graduate of Krull’s own college of wizards. [COM]
Margolotta, Lady. Lady Margolotta Amaya Ketrina Assumpta Crassina von Überwald. Referred to, by the dwarfs, as ‘the Dark Lady’. A rich vampire from Überwald, who occupies four pages in the Almanack de Gothicke. She lives in a castle that looks as though it could be taken by a small squad of not very intelligent soldiers. The builder was clearly influenced by fairy tales and, possibly, by some of the more ornamental sorts of cake. It is a castle for looking at. In the chintzy sitting room, with patterns on the furniture which have a bit of a bat look about them, we find Lady Margolotta.
She is not particularly tall, quite pleasant and with a slightly fussy air. She looks like someone’s mother – someone with an expensive education, that is, and she moves like someone who’s grown used to her body. She wears pearls, a pink jumper and sensible flat shoes. Admittedly, there are bats embroidered on the jumper. At her feet, lying on a cushion, is a little dog with a bow at its neck. It looks more like a rat.
Lady Margolotta does not drink human blood. She has been ‘teetotal’ for almost four years when we meet her and she is a member of the Überwald League of TEMPERANCE – the black ribboners.
She was the person who, by diplomacy, and probably more direct means, had got things moving again in Überwald and she had some sort of . . . relationship with Vetinari. Everyone knew it, and, that was all everyone knew. A dot dot dot dot relationship. One of those. And nobody had been able to join up the dots. She had been to the city on diplomatic visits, and not even the well-practised dowagers of Ankh-Morpork had been able to detect a whisper of anything other than a businesslike amiability and international co-operation between the two of them. And they play endless and complex games via the clacks system, and that apart from that, that was, well that. [TFE, UA]
Maroon, Mrs. The widow of a Watchman, Sergeant Maroon. Secretly the recipient of a small pension paid personally by Captain Vimes. [MAA]
Marrowleaf. Wizard and author of the Theory of Thaumic Imponderability. This says that it is impossible to know exactly what any magical spell will do until afterwards, when it will be too late, although the Theory itself takes ninety clo
sely-written pages. [SM]
Maurice. ‘The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents’ are first referred to during the events of Reaper Man. We then knew of him that he ran a very remunerative operation by infesting a city with rats and then charging the city a large sum to get rid of them. We now know that he is a talking cat. A mucky yellow-eyed tabby, in fact. Before the magical events that gave him self-awareness and a speaking voice, he had lived on the streets of Ankh-Morpork for four years and as a result barely had any ears left and scars all over his face. He has a cat’s self-assurance in spades. He swaggers so much that if he doesn’t slow down he flips himself over and when he fluffs his tail up, people have to step around it. His money-making scam is aided by a stupid-looking kid called KEITH, who plays the pipes, and by a band of intelligent, talking rats, whose numbers included:
Additives
Bestbefore
Big Savings
Bitesize
DANGEROUS BEANS
DARKTAN
Delicious
Farmhouse
Feedsfour
Finest
Fresh
HAMNPORK
Inbrine
Kidney
NOURISHING
PEACHES
SARDINES
Sellby
Specialoffer
Tomato
Toxie
[RM, TAMAHER]
Mazda, Fingers. A sort of mythic hero to thieves everywhere. He was the first thief in the world; he stole fire from the gods. He was unable to fence it. It was too hot. [MAA]
M’Bu. Twelve-year old assistant to Azhural N’choate, a Howondaland livestock exporter. He also had one of the best organisational brains in the world, which was entirely necessary to get one thousand elephants all the way to Ankh-Morpork (a trek which at one point included sledging them down mountains). [MP]
Medicine. Discworld medicine is occasionally sophisticated but always erratic.
It might be thought that the practice of medicine would be simple in a world where magic is commonplace, and in purely diagnostic terms this is often the case. But Unseen University wizards, certainly, are expressly forbidden to use magic to cure. Magic is tricky stuff and can have a mind of its own – using it to perform a complex operation might solve the immediate problem but it might also present the patient with a range of new, and probably worse, ones. An analogy would be bringing in a wolf to keep the foxes away from your sheep. It would work, but . . .
Putting back an arm by magic would not be difficult, but getting it to do what its new owner wanted – since it would now be a creature of magic – would be hard and would involve a lot of embarrassment and the probable wearing of a boxing glove at night.
So in Ankh-Morpork, for example, the term ‘surgical precision’ still means ‘to within an inch or two, with a lot of sawdust about, and a bucket of hot pitch in the corner’. However, wizards can be used as anaesthetists in preference to the usual large hammer.
Outside the cities of the STO PLAINS the stricken usually resort to witches. Techniques vary, ranging from Keep the Patient Amused While Nature Takes Its Course (since people often get better from things that don’t actually kill them) to serious if haphazard knowledge of the genuine healing properties of herbs.
Chiropracty in particular is a witch art – many a witch knows the amazing healing properties of a good prod in the right place. Few other people understand this; throughout the history of the universe people gained an inconvenient reputation for messiahdom merely by demonstrating a useful knowledge of the common slipped disc. (See also RETROPHRENOLOGY.)
Mellius and Gretelina. The Disc’s greatest lovers, whose pure, passionate and soulsearing affair would have scorched the pages of History had they not been born 200 years apart on different continents. [M]
Mended Drum, the. (See DRUM.)
Merchants’ Guild. Motto: VILIS AD BIS PRETII. Coat of arms: a shield, quartered. In the top-right quarter, a jeune coq, gules, on a field d’or; in the bottom-left quarter, a tête de boeuf, gules on a field d’or. In the top-left quarter, a vaisseau d’or on a field, azure; in the bottom right quarter, a bourse d’or on a field, azure. Superimposed on the shield, a morpork holding an ankh.
The youngest of Ankh-Morpork Guilds, founded in self-defence by the city’s traders and shopkeepers when they realised that their role in the great scheme of things was to be robbed. ‘Robbing fat merchants’, it seemed, was a perfectly socially acceptable thing for even heroic heroes to do. ‘Ah, yonder lies a fat merchant,’ they’d cry, using the special Landlord-a-flagon-of-your finest-ale hero talk, ‘let us relieve him of some of his ill-gotten gains, ’pon my scalliard!’ And this to a man who’d been up all night carefully mixing sand with the sugar, and who regularly gave small sums to the less smelly beggars.
The Guild was thus formed to peacefully further the aims of its members, advertise the civic charms of Ankh-Morpork and beat seven kinds of hell out of anyone with a leather loincloth. It is now one of the city’s more talkative pressure groups.
It is particularly hot in pursuit of those misguided people who publicly fail to recognise the many attractive points of their fine city. The merchants now hire large gangs of men with ears like fists and fists like bags of walnuts to point out that Ankh-Morpork is, on the contrary, a marvellously clean and decent city in which to live, a process whose on-going nature might be swiftly curtailed if that person does not shut up right now.
The Guild has an annual knife-and-fork supper, held in the upper room of the Mended DRUM. [M]
Mericet. A tutor and examiner at the ASSASSINS’ GUILD. He lectures about Strategy and Poison Theory every Thursday afternoon. An old, bald man with a tiny, dried-up smile that had all the warmth boiled out of it long ago. And one of the city’s most skilled assassins. [P]
Meserole, Lady. Lady (Madam) Roberta (Bobbi) Meserole is a wealthy lady with business interests in Genua and ÜBERWALD and who lives on the corner of Easy Street and Treacle Mine Road, close to the old Watch House. She has brown eyes, brown hair, intricately painted fingernails and she wears an expensive-looking vivid purple dress. She has the trace of a Genuan accent. She owns a cat with a diamond collar, but the effect is somewhat spoiled because the cat is an elderly, ginger street tom with irregular bouts of flatulence. She is, it seems, Lord VETINARI’S aunt. [NW]
Mica. A bridge troll encountered by COHEN the Barbarian. [TB]
Michael, Cumbling. A member of the BEGGARS’ GUILD. [MAA]
Mims, Terpsic. An angler in KRULL, rescued from drowning in the Hakrull river by Death because he had fallen in too soon. [M]
Mint, Royal, Ankh-Morpork. It would be hard to imagine an uglier building that hadn’t won a major architectural award. The Mint is a gaunt brick and stone block, its windows high, small, many and barred, its doors protected by portcullises. Its whole construction says to the world: Don’t Even Think About It.
Poking out of the roof is a sort of disc-shaped device which makes it look like a money box with a big coin stuck in the slot. This did, indeed, used to be known as the Bad Penny. It is a large treadmill to provide power for the coin stamps. It used to be powered by prisoners, back in the days when ‘community service’ wasn’t just a word. Or even two.
Its main hall is three storeys high, and picks up a fair amount of daylight from the rows of barred windows, which send shafts of dusty sunlight slanting to the floor. Everything else is sheds.
Sheds have been built onto the walls and even hang like swallows’ nests up near the ceiling, accessed by unsafe-looking wooden stairs. The uneven floor itself is a small village of sheds, placed any old how, no two alike, each one carefully roofed against the non-existent prospect of rain. Wisps of smoke spiral gently through the thick air. Against one wall a forge glows, providing the dark orange glow that gives the place the right stygian atmosphere. The place looks like the after-death destination for people who have committed small and rather dull sins.
This is, however, just the background. What do
minates the hall is the Bad Penny. This treadmill is strange. There is one in the Tanty, wherein inmates can invigorate their cardio-vascular systems whether they want to or not. The Bad Penny is much larger, but hardly seems to be there at all. There is a metal rim that looks frighteningly thin. It’s hard to see the spokes at all, until you realise that there are no spokes as such, just hundreds of thin wires. [MM]
Modo. The dwarf gardener at Unseen University. He used to be the assistant gardener at the Palace. He smokes a pipe, and is often found in a secluded area behind the High Energy Magic building where he lights his bonfires, keeps his compost heaps, his pile of leaf mould and the little shed where he sits when it rains. He is a great believer in compost – his compost heaps heave and glow faintly in the dark, perhaps because of the possibly illegal ingredients Modo feeds them. ARCHCHANCELLORS have come and gone, UU has been destroyed and rebuilt, various dire horrors have visited the city, and Modo has still managed to mow the lawns every Friday. [RM]
Molly, Queen. Head of the BEGGARS’ GUILD. She walks with a stick and wears layers and layers of rags. Her hair looks as though it has been permed by a hurricane and her face is a mass of sores and warts (which have sub-warts, and they have their own hair). A very sharp woman. [MAA]
Monarchy, Ankh-Morporkian. For most of its history Ankh-Morpork has been a monarchy. An important distinction, however, must be made between the kings of Ankh-Morpork and the kings of Ankh. The original kings of Ankh are enshrined in city mythology as ‘real’ kings (i.e., wise, powerful, charismatic, etc.), while the later kings of Ankh-Morpork are remembered as, well, real kings (i.e., power-mad, unjust and inventively evil).
Little is really known of the line of the kings of Ankh. It came to an end approximately 2,000 years ago and its period is generally thought of as a ‘golden age’ – i.e., a time so long ago that no one can remember how wretched it was. Its physical remains are few: there are the ancient sewers, the ruins of what was possibly a castle on the hillock known as The Tump, a throne so worm-eaten that it would become a cloud of dust if sat upon and – according to legend – a sword.
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