Ptorne. A Djelibeybian farmer who was a plaintiff before TEPPIC in the Supreme Court. [P]
Ptraci. Favourite handmaiden (and daughter) of King TEPPICYMON XXVII. Long, dark hair; small, pretty jaw; painted toenails. She uses scent like a battering ram. Not a great singer, despite the traditional requirement of handmaidens to be skilled in music; in fact she sounds like a flock of vultures who’ve just found a dead donkey. Ptraci became Queen of DJELIBEYBI when TEPPIC renounced the throne, whereupon the priests and courtiers found that sweet young handmaidens can be far tougher to deal with than amiable old pharaohs. [P]
Pump, Mr. An eight-foot-tall golem, whom we first encounter as Moist von Lipwig’s Parole Officer. He was originally Pump No.19, and stood at the bottom of a hundred foot deep hole and pumped water. He was at the bottom of that hole for 240 years, but is now a government official with perfect recall (he can replicate anyone’s voice). Lord Vetinari selected him as Moist’s parole officer because Mr Pump does not sleep, Mr Pump does not eat, Mr Pump does not stop. [GP]
Purdeigh, General Sir Roderick. Son of Major-General Sir Ruthven Purdeigh, and Margaret, née Burberry. He had a distinguished military record before taking up a rather chequered career as an explorer, hampered by his creative lack of direction and by his overbearing attitude to any natives he discovered – a major disadvantage to anyone whose only known method of navigation was to stop and ask people the way. He met his end, it is believed, at the hands of the natives of Bhangbhangduc. [DM]
Pushpram, Verity. ‘Queen of the Sea’. A trader in fish in Ankh-Morpork’s fish market. She is a self-made woman – although she could have used some help when it came to her eyes, which are set so far apart that she resembles a turbot. She initially made enough from her stall to buy a boat, then another boat, and then a whole aisle in the fish market. [UA]
Puzuma, ambiguous. The fastest animal on the Disc, the puzuma is extremely neurotic and moves so fast that it can actually achieve near light-speed in the Disc’s magical field. This means that, if you can see one, it isn’t there. Most male puzumas die young of acute ankle failure caused by running very fast after females which aren’t there and, of course, achieving suicidal mass in accordance with relativistic theory. The rest of them die of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, since it is impossible for them to know who they are and where they are at the same time, and the see-sawing loss of concentration this engenders means that the puzuma achieves a sense of identity only when it is at rest – usually about fifty feet into the rubble of what remains of the mountain it just ran into at near light-speed. The puzuma is rumoured to be about the size of a leopard with a rather unique black and white chequered coat, although those specimens discovered by the Disc’s sages and philosophers have inclined them to declare that in its natural state the puzuma is flat, very thin, and dead. [P]
Pyjama, Hrolf. A dwarf enlisted into the Ankh-Morpork city militia by Carrot. [MAA]
Pyramids. Dams in the stream of time. Correctly shaped and oriented, with proper paracosmic measurements correctly plumbed in, the temporal potential of the great mass of stone can be diverted to accelerate or reverse time over a very small area, in the same way that a hydraulic ram can be induced to pump water against the flow.
The whole point of a correctly built pyramid is to achieve absolute null time in the central chamber so that a dying king, tucked up there, will indeed live for ever – or at least never actually die. The time that should have passed in the chamber is stored in the bulk of the pyramid and allowed to flare off once every twenty-four hours.
Many of the Klatchian countries have built pyramids at some stage in their history, but in Djelibeybi they became a national obsession. [P]
Qu. Master of Devices for the History MONKS. He is tall and rather heavily built, with white hair and a straw hat. He has the look of a good-natured bank manager. Qu invented the Portable PROCRASTINATOR, a device for adjusting time in the immediate vicinity of the wearer. In fact, most of his devices, in theory created to aid agents in the field, are achieved by taking the ancient technology of the Procrastinators and harnessing it to practical, everyday purposes such as blowing people’s heads off. [TOT, NW]
Quarney. The only shopkeeper in LANCRE. Mrs Quarney also helps him to run the store. [LL]
Quantum. In a nutshell, a word used on Discworld to summarise any complex scientific explanation in pretty much the same way as ‘magic’, here, is used to summarise any complex occult one. A kind of cosmic ‘get out of half-understood explanation free’ card, in other words.
Quezovercoatl. The Feathered Boa. God of Human Sacrifices. Half-man, half-chicken, half-jaguar, half-serpent, half-scorpion and half-mad. Quezovercoatl was both a God of the Tezuman Empire and a demon. He was also six inches high. Or was. He got trampled to death. The Tezumen now worship a metal-bound chest with hundreds of little legs. [E]
Quimby II, Olaf. A PATRICIAN of Ankh-Morpork. He passed some legislation to put a stop to excessive exaggeration in descriptive writing, and to introduce some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend said of a hero that ‘all men spoke of his prowess’, any bard who valued his life would add hastily ‘except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar and quite a lot of other people who had never really heard of him.’ Poetic simile was strictly limited and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne. Quimby was eventually killed by a disgruntled poet during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’ In his memory it was amended to include the phrase ‘only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp’.
Quirke, ‘Mayonnaise’. He started out in the Night Watch, where he rose to the rank of corporal and where he was thought to have a private income from bribes. He was a bully, a brown-noser and a delighter in small evils. After being booted out by Sergeant Keel he found a niche in the Day Watch, where he eventually rose to the rank of captain. Called ‘Mayonnaise’ because he’s thick, oily, and smells faintly of eggs. Quirke is not actually a bad man in the classic sense, but only because he doesn’t have the necessary imagination. He deals more in that sort of generalised low-grade unpleasantness which slightly tarnishes the soul of all who come into contact with it.
Quirm. A pleasant little city in a winegrowing area overlooking the Rim Ocean. Wild geraniums fill its sloping, cobbled streets. It has a famous floral clock. And that really says it all about Quirm. It is a dull place. Most of its inhabitants have lived elsewhere during times of considerable excitement and have sworn mighty oaths that it won’t happen here.
Quirm College for Young Ladies. School attended by DEATH’S granddaughter, Susan STO HELIT, and also by Miss Perspicacia TICK. It is surrounded by high, spike-topped walls whose aim is to protect its young inmates from the wicked world and whose effect is to cause them to have a keen curiosity about it.
The school uniform is a loose, navy-blue woollen smock that stretches from neck to just above the ankle, with a waistline somewhere around knee level (practical, healthy, and as attractive as a plank). The girls also have to wear their hair in two plaits; if they are dwarfs they may keep their iron helmets on but they have to plait their beards instead.
Riddled with a kind of genteel wrongheadedness though it is, the College is one of the very few establishments in the STO PLAINS where a girl can get other than the most simple vocational education. Its alumni are women who know their own minds, even if no one else does. [SM, TWFM]
Quisition. The sharp end of the religious system in OMNIA. It comprised the inquisitors – torturers who extracted confessions and bodily parts from heretics – and the exquisitors, who just . . . arranged matters. By and large the inquisitors were simple, burly men who just had a job to do. It was they who would busy themselves about your person with knives and needles and hammers; it was the exquisitor who will tal
k to you afterwards. Some people who have survived both have said that half an hour with an inquisitor and his complete kit was preferable to a pleasant chat over a cup of tea with an exquisitor.
The Quisition felt they could act without possibility of error. Suspicion was proof. How could it be anything else, it was argued? The Great God OM would not have seen fit to put the suspicion in the minds of his exquisitors unless it was right that it should be there. Some people pointed out the essential flaw in this argument, but not very loudly and they were often running while they said it.
The Quisition’s unwritten motto was: ‘CVIVS TESTICVLOS HABES, HABEAS CARDIA ET CEREBELLVM’, which, loosely translated, means that when you have people’s full attention, you have their hearts and minds. The organisation has now been abolished. [SG]
Quizzing device. A three-ton, water-driven monstrosity based on a recently discovered design by LEONARD OF QUIRM. It is a games machine once used in the Mended DRUM but removed when Captain CARROT of the WATCH found it a useful way of picking up criminal intelligence. [SM]
Quoom, Ishmale. Inquisitor First Class Ishmale ‘Pop’ Quoom. A retired inquisitor in OMNIA. Handed in his knives and corkscrew-shaped things after fifty years, shortly before the Quisition itself was forcibly retired. Remembered as an amiable, good-hearted sort, with plenty of time for everyone, and a man always ready to show apprentice torturers how to break every bone in the human body (including the little ones in the fingers, which are quite hard to do). Breeds canaries in his spare time. [SG]
Quoth. A talking raven owned by C.V. CHEESEWALLER. Originally from the un-kindness of ravens in the forever crumbling, ivy-clad TOWER OF ART overlooking Unseen University, whose innate intelligence has been amplified by the magical radiation from the buildings below. Quoth is not his actual name; ravens have never felt the need for such things. Despite his intelligence, however, he has yet to understand that not every small round glittery thing is an eyeball, or why human beings will cheerfully put out crumbs for robins but stop short of entrails for corvids, no matter how intelligent they are. He has now attached himself to Death’s household as the DEATH OF RATS’ personal transport and crony. He is only in it for the eyeballs, he says.
Ramkin, ‘Black Jack’. ‘Black Jack’ Ramkin was regrettably mistaken when he made an enormous drunken wager with one of his equally drunk drinking pals that he could see the smoke of the city from his estate. He was told by a surveyor, who had tested the hypothesis, that Hangman’s Hill was thirty feet too short. Pausing only to attempt to bribe the surveyor, and when unsuccessful to subsequently horsewhip the same, he rallied all the menfolk from this estate and all the others round about and set them to raise the hill by the aforesaid thirty feet, a most ambitious project. It cost a fortune, of course, but every family in the district probably got warm winter clothes and new boots out of it. It made him very popular, and of course he won his bet. Two gallons of brandy. Which he drank in one go, at the top of the Hill, to the cheers of the assembled workforce, and then, according to legend, rolled all the way down to the bottom, to more cheers. [SN]
Ramkin, Lady Sybil Deirdre Olgivanna. (See VIMES, LADY SYBIL DEIRDRE OLGIVANNA)
Ramkin, Woolsthorpe. Brother to Mad Jack, the 3rd Earl. He was something of a scholar and would have been sent to the University to become a wizard were it not for the fact that his brother let it be known that any male sibling of his who took up a profession that involved wearing a dress would be disinherited with a cleaver.
Nevertheless, young Woolsthorpe persevered in his studies of natural philosophy in the way a gentleman should, by digging into any suspicious-looking burial mounds he could find in the neighbourhood, filling up his lizard press with as many rare species as he could collect, and drying samples of any flowers he could find before they became extinct.
The story runs that, on one warm summer day, he dozed off under an apple tree and was awakened when an apple fell on his head. A lesser man, as his biographer put it, would have seen nothing untoward about this, but Woolsthorpe surmised that, since apples and practically everything else always fell down, then the world would eventually become dangerously unbalanced – unless there was another agency involved that natural philosophy had yet to discover. He lost no time in dragging one of the footmen to the orchard and ordering him, on pain of dismissal, to lie under the tree until an apple hit him on the head! The possibility of this happening was increased by another footman who had been told by Woolsthorpe to shake the tree vigorously until the required apple fell. Woolsthorpe was ready to observe this from a distance.
Who can imagine his joy when the inevitable apple fell and a second apple was seen rising from the tree and disappearing at speed into the vaults of heaven, proving the hypothesis that what goes up must come down, provided that what goes down must come up, thus safeguarding the equilibrium of the Universe. Regrettably, this only works with apples and, amazingly, only the apples on this one tree, Malus equilibria! Someone has now worked out that the apples at the top of the tree fill with gas and fly up when the tree is disturbed so that it can set its seeds some way off. Wonderful thing, nature, shame the fruit tastes like dog’s business. [SN]
Ramtops. A range of jagged peaks, upland lakes, dense forests and little river valleys so deep that the day light has no sooner reached the bottom than it is time to leave again. The Ramtop Mountains stretch from the frozen lands near the Hub all the way, via a lengthy archipelago, to the warm seas which flow into space over the Rim.
Raw magic crackles invisibly from peak to peak and earths itself in the mountains, because the range lies across the Disc’s vast magical standing wave like an iron bar on a pair of subway rails. It is so saturated with magic that it is constantly discharging itself into the environment. In the Ramtops the leaves on the trees move even when there is no breeze; rocks go for a stroll of an evening. Even the land, at times, seems alive. It is not surprising that the Ramtops have given the world so many of its famous witches and wizards.
There is plenty of flat land in the Ramtops: the trouble is, it’s nearly all flat in the vertical plane. There are little kingdoms all over the place. Every narrow valley, every ledge that something other than a goat could stand on, is a kingdom; LANCRE is one of the biggest.
On the Turnwise slopes, leading towards the STO PLAINS, are the rolling uplands known as the OCTARINE grass country from the distinctive colour imparted to its vegetation by the ambient local magic. From the highest points in the Lancre area – the High Tops – you can see all the way to the Rim Ocean. In the other direction, wrapped in eternal winter, they march all the way to the Hub.
The Ramtops have very definite weather. Winter in the Ramtops doesn’t mess about; it’s a gateway straight through to the primeval coldness that lived before the creation of the world. Winter in the Ramtops is several yards of snow, the forests a mere collection of shadowy green tunnels under the drifts. Winter means the coming of the lazy wind, which can’t be bothered to blow around people and blows right through them instead. Ramtoppers have eighteen different words for snow (all of them, unfortunately, unprintable). No dweller in the Ramtops would dream of starting a winter without a log pile on three sides of the house – no one in the Ramtops lets their fire go out, as a matter of pride and, in the winter, survival.
And after the snow melts, there’s the rain. Ramtop rain has a curiously penetrative quality that makes ordinary rain seem almost dry. It rains a lot in the spring. The weather is full of shrapnel rain and whiplash winds and permanent thunder storms.
The summer and autumn are hot, dry and pleasant. They are also quite brief. The Ramtops breed a phlegmatic, insular type of person.
Rascal, Methodia. Born, painted famous picture, thought he was a chicken, died. He’s believed to have painted around Discworld year 1802. Mad as a spoon. He used to write notes he wanted to keep secret from ‘the chicken’. His last note is believed to be ‘Awk! Awk! It comes! IT COMES!’ He is best known as the creator of ‘The Battle of Koom Valley’ a ten-f
oot high, fifty-foot long masterpiece which took him years to complete and which was, for a while, owned by the Ramkin family. [T!]
Rat Catchers, the. The two rat catchers encountered during the events of The Amazing Maurice were called Ron Blunkett and Bill Spears. Both wore long dusty overcoats and battered black top hats, with large, shiny, black boots. They had a small terrier. One was big and fat, one was thin – in fact they made some effort to comply with all the narrative stereotypes for comic thugs. [TAMAHER]
Re-annual plants. Plants on the Disc, while including the categories known commonly as annuals (which are sown this year to come up later this year), biennials (sown this year to grow next year) and perennials (sown this year to grow until further notice), also include a few rare re-annuals which, because of an unusual four-dimensional twist in their genes, can be planted this year to come up last year. They can be grown only in excessively high magical fields, such as are found in the RAMTOPS.
Re-annual grapes produce wine much sought after by fortune tellers since it enables them to see the future. Although re-annual wine causes inebriation in the normal way, the action of the digestive system on its molecules causes an unusual reaction whose net effect is to thrust the ensuing hangover backwards in time, to a point some hours before the wine is drunk. A hangunder, in fact. These tend to be very bad, because people feel so dreadful with the effect of the alcohol they have not yet consumed that they drink a lot to get over it. Hence the saying: ‘Have a hair of the dog that’s going to bite you.’
Re-annual crop-growing is an art in itself. It does have some advantages, in that the grower can raise enough on the crop to afford to buy the seed and rent the field, but there are concomitant drawbacks. A farmer who neglects to sow his seed loses his crop, whereas anyone who forgets to sow seeds of a crop that was harvested twelve months before risks disturbing the entire fabric of causality, not to mention acute embarrassment.
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