Ironfoundersson, Mr. ‘King’ Ironfoundersson, of COPPERHEAD in LANCRE. CARROT’S adoptive father. He made the crown for the Queen of Lancre. As is usual among dwarfs, the royal title is merely a technical term and has few of the connotations that it carries among humans, where being treated ‘like royalty’ means that people are likely to try to take sneaky pictures of you with your clothes off. [LL]
Ishkible. Prophet of the Omnian religion. [SG]
Ixolite. One of the last surviving banshees. A member of the FRESH START CLUB, who stays at Mrs CAKE’S lodging house. Tall, with a long, sad face, he is usually seen wrapped in something which may be a long cloak but could possibly be wings. He has a speech impediment and is shy of meeting people, so instead of sitting on rooftops screaming when people are about to die he just writes them a suitable note (‘OooeeeOooeeeOoooeee’) and slips it under the door and runs away. Technically, banshees should be female; this might be one of the reasons for his sadness. [RM, LL, MAA]
Jackrum, Sergeant. (Jack). Later Sergeant-Major. A big fat sergeant in the Borogravian army – Tenth Infantry – the ‘Ins & Outs’ (also, the ‘Cheesemongers’). The word ‘fat’ could not honestly be applied to Jackrum, not when the word ‘gross’ is lumbering forward to catch your attention. One of those people who don’t have a waist – instead, Jackrum has an equator. A gravity. If Jackrum fell over, in any direction, he would rock. Sun and drink have dried his face red – his small dark eyes twinkle in the redness like the sparkle on the edge of a knife. In his shirtsleeves, he is still almost spherical – from his neck, folds of skin lap their way down to the tropical regions.
Has had a long career in the army – over forty years. He has been court-martialled twice (got off both times), saved the life of General FROC and is believed to have killed at least one officer. Around his neck he wears his official King’s Shilling and a locket with a picture of a dark-haired girl and a young man (William), who was killed at Sepple. Jackrum used to run a pig farm and look after his three brothers. He has a son, William, who is an armourer in Scritz. [MR]
Jackson, ‘Tonker’. An old army pal of Sergeant Fred COLON. [ MAA ]
Jade, Princess. A troll schoolfriend of SUSAN at the QUIRM COLLEGE FOR YOUNG LADIES. She had bad eyesight, knitted chain mail in handicraft class and had a note excusing her from unnecessary sunshine. Comes from the COPPERHEAD area of LANCRE. Anti-siliconism is still a feature of Discworld affairs and she was probably accepted because snobbery beat speciesism; the headmistress said a princess, even a troll one, would add ton to the school. In Jade’s case she was right to within a few pounds. [SM]
Jaims. A son of Gordo Smith and another brother of ESK. [ER]
Jape, Brother. Lecturer at the FOOLS’ GUILD. He has a soul like cold boiled string and teaches juggling. [WS]
Jeannie. The Kelda of Tiffany’s local Nac Mac Feegle and wife to ROB ANYBODY. As round as a tiny football. Very wise and kind, she is an educating and calming influence on the Feegles. Jeannie is a modern kelda, and she has encouraged literacy among her sons and brothers.
Jefferson, Jethro. Village blacksmith near to Ramkin Hall. He lives, with his old mum, near the centre of the village, overlooking the village green. [SN]
Jenkins, Owlswick. An expert engraver (and stamp forger). He is a little man, clean shaven apart from a little pointy beard. He used to live in Short Alley, Ankh-Morpork – no house number because Short Alley is only big enough for one door. Has also been known as Exorbit Clamp and Owlswick Clamp. He is, by certain standards, very sane. Faced with a world too busy, complex and incomprehensible to deal with, he’s reduced it to a small bubble just big enough to hold him and his palette. It’s nice and quiet in there. All the noises are far away, and They can’t spy on him. [MM]
Jerakeen. One of the four giant elephants supporting the Discworld. [COM]
Jimbo. Best friend to CRASH. Plays the bass guitar, or at least moves his hands on one, in Crash’s musical group – originally called Insanity. [SM]
Jiminy. Landlord of the Goblin’s Head, close to Ramkin Hall. He lives there with his wife, and his daughter, who is a maid up at Ramkin Hall. He used to be a copper in the Pseudopolis City Watch, and he still keeps his rosewood truncheon under the bar at the pub. [SN]
Jimmi. God of beggars. Panhandles prayers.
Jimmy, Doughnut. Full name: James Folsom. A horse doctor in Ankh-Morpork, who can usually be found up the stables on King’s Down. He has bandy legs, hence his name, but the second thing people notice about him is his teeth – the colour of the inside of an unwashed teapot and arranged like an explosion in a graveyard. Oddly enough, in a city where people have to die as best they can without doctors to help them, Doughnut is a handy man to have in a medical emergency. After all, he usually works with racehorses, which are worth a lot of money, rather than people, who generally aren’t worth very much. So he had to get results, because the kind of people who race and bet on horses can get very, very angry if none are forthcoming. However, if you call him in you must remember that he won’t ask you questions, may well prescribe bran and, if you have a broken leg, will shoot you. [FOC]
Johnson, Bergholt Stuttley (‘Bloody Stupid Johnson’). A broadly incompetent landscape gardener, but also considerably unskilled in the fields of civic statuary and large musical instruments.
Also known as ‘Bloody Stupid “It Might Look A Bit Messy Now But Just You Come Back in Five Hundred Years’ Time” Johnson’, or ‘Bloody Stupid “Look, The Plans Were the Right Way Round When I Drew Them” Johnson’.
It would be wrong to call him completely unskilled, because some of the creations for which he’ll be remembered must surely have taken considerable skill. It was just not the right skill.
Fundamental to his approach was blindness to the significance of, and more importantly the difference between, such things as feet and inches and ounces and pounds. He never let this get him down, however, and was relentlessly cheerful in the face of endless disappointment.
Among his achievements were an artificial hillock built from 2,000 tons of earth in front of Quirm Manor because ‘It’d drive me mad to have to look at a bunch of trees and mountains all day long, how about you?’; he also designed the commemorative arch celebrating the Battle of Crumhorn, which is kept in a small cardboard box, the Collapsed Tower of Quirm, the huge beehive in the Palace gardens, the Quirm Memorial, the Hanging Gardens of Ankh and the Colossus of Morpork (the last three are pocket-sized), and the ornamental cruet set for Mad Lord SNAPCASE. Four families live in the salt shaker, and the pepper pot is used for storing grain (both in Upper Broadway, souvenir guidebook 2p).
Johnson was never a man to let inexperience or incompetence in any field stand in his way, and with his near-godlike ineptitude often achieved effects that a genius might find hard to accomplish. For example, he built the organ in the Ankh-Morpork OPERA HOUSE as well as the great organ of Unseen University, which has the widest range of any musical instrument known to man, god or devil. The organ is also linked by some means (to Johnson all pipes are pretty much the same) to the UU’s Patent ‘Typhoon’ Superior Indoor Ablutorium with Automatic Soap Dish, recently re-opened. However, only Archchanellor RIDCULLY was brave or foolish enough to have a shower in it. No one has ever got to the bottom of what happened, but he had it sealed up again very soon afterwards.
He also designed the Sorting Machine at the Ankh-Morpork Post Office. (It had started life as an organ, but ended up as a machine for sorting letters.)
Strangely enough, Johnson’s renowned lack of aptitude brought him considerable fame and quite a few commissions in later life. There are always very rich people looking for fashionable and amusing ways of spending their money, and Johnson was for a while much in demand by those who found that oversized ornamental temples at the bottom of small lakes, or tree-lined avenues four feet long, brightened up their day. It became quite the thing ‘to have been Johnsoned’.
Johnson can be summed up as being on the opposite end of the scale which, at
the other end, contains people like LEONARD OF QUIRM. The high spot of his career is thought to be the PATRICIAN’S PALACE grounds (do not go at noon, when the chiming sundial tends to explode).
Jolson, All. A huge man who owns a restaurant close to Broad Way. He is Ankh-Morpork’s best chef and keenest eater. He is a man who’d show up on an atlas and could change the orbit of small planets. Therefore, no one seeing him for the first time could believe it was all Jolson. He has a daughter, Precious. [TFE]
Jolson, Precious. Daughter of All Jolson and Constable in the A-M City Watch. She is a large – family-sized – good-natured lady. A fountainhead of jolliness. [SN]
Jones, Llamedos. One of the Disc’s semi-mythical religious explorers. Legend has it that he set out one day in his leather coracle armed with no more than a holy sickle, a sack of mistletoe, a small portable stone circle and a harmonium, in an inspired effort to bring the advantages of Strict Druidism to the heathen. No one has yet found out what these advantages were.
Jorgen. A cousin of Lance-Constable CUDDY. A dwarf, and a watchmaker. [MAA]
Judy. A goblin. Works, reluctantly, with Chas SLUMBER. [TOC]
Jupe, Father. A priest of Nuggan. [MR]
Kaos. An anthropomorphic personification. The Fifth Horseman of the APOCRALYPSE, although he left before they got famous, and always said he didn’t begrudge them their later success. He embodies apparently complicated, apparently patternless behaviour that nevertheless has a simple, deterministic explanation and is a key to new levels of understanding of the multidimensional universe (or so LU TZE says). He rides out on a chariot drawn by a black horse which shines as though illuminated by a red light – redness spangles off its shoulders and flanks. Kaos’ eyes are black – shiny and black without any whites at all. Carrying his sword of burning cold, he wears a full-face helmet with eyeholes that look slightly like the wings of a butterfly, and rather more like the eyes of some strange, alien creature. See also SOAK, Ronald. [TOT]
Keeble, Liona. A job broker in Ankh-Morpork. [M, RM]
Keel, John. Past sergeant of the Night Watch. He used to be with the Watch in Pseudopolis. Notable by his eyepatch and a noticeable scar on his face, Keel was the sergeant who taught young Sam Vimes all he needed to know about proper policing. His grave is in the Cemetery of Small Gods. [NW]
Keepsake, Duchess of. Turkey-necked mother of Letitia. When we first meet her she is a bully, with a shiny black stick with a silver knob at the end. She always travels in funeral clothes because, she says, you never know when someone is going to drop dead. She lives at Keepsake Hall, at the far end of the Chalk. Before she married the Duke, she was a dancer in the music hall, and was called Deirdre Parsley. [ISWM]
Keith. A fair-haired young man, called ‘Kid’ and ‘Stupid-looking Kid’ by MAURICE. He was found on a doorstep at the Guild of MUSICIANS. He is good at playing musical instruments and has been earning his own living since the age of six. With MAURICE, and some educated rodents, he was part of the ‘Pied Piper’ scam in Überwald. [TAMAHER]
Keli. Princess Kelirehenna of STO LAT. When first encountered, she was a slim, red-haired girl of fifteen with a strong jawline; not beautiful, being over-endowed in the freckle department and, frankly, rather on the skinny side. Her role in life was to fail to be killed by an assassin owing to the gland-led incompetence of MORT.
She eventually became Her Supreme Majesty, Queen Kelirehenna I, Lord of Sto Lat, Protector of the Eight Protectorates, and Empress of the Long Thin Debated Piece Hubwards of Sto Kerrig. [M]
Ken, Stalling. A beggar on the streets of Ankh-Morpork. He had the privilege of supping with Death, or at least of supping with Death and getting up the next morning. [SM]
Kepple. A past sergeant of the Night Watch in Ankh-Morpork. He was head of the Watch when Sam Vimes was a recruit. [MAA]
Khat-leon-ra-pta, Queen. A past monarch of DJELIBEYBI, during the 2nd Empire. She conquered Howandaland, but it was subsequently sold back to its inhabitants to pay for yet more pyramids. [P]
Kheneth XIV. Past monarch of DJELIBEYBI. [P]
Khuft. Accidental discoverer of the subsequently mighty land of DJELIBEYBI. A small, dark man in a loincloth and with two blackened stumps of teeth. He fled into the desert to escape disgruntled purchasers of his sub-standard camels, and founded a huge dynasty. [P]
Khufurah, Prince. Younger brother of Prince Cadram of Klatch. A tall, bearded man, with disconcertingly intelligent eyes, who had once been athletic until all the big dinners associated with his class took their effect. [J]
King, Harry. Known as ‘King of the Golden River’, and less politely as Piss Harry. Harry can’t read or write, but that has been no drawback to his career, because he employs people who can. He is an enormous man, pink and shiny-faced, with a few strands of hair teased across his head. It’s hard not to imagine him in shirtsleeves and braces, or not smoking a cigar. He is married to Effie and they have two daughters, Daphne and Hermione. He has a persistent, but not particularly bad, odour of old potatoes and abandoned tunnels. Except for the pinky of his left hand, he has a heavy gold ring on each finger spelling H.A.R.R.Y.K.I.N.G.
Harry King had made his fortune by the careful application of the old adage: where there’s muck there’s brass. There was money to be made out of things that people threw away. Especially the very human things that people threw away.
The real foundations of his fortune came when he started leaving empty buckets at various hostelries around the city centre, especially those that were more than a gutter’s length from the river. He charged a very modest fee to take them away when they were full. It became part of the life of every pub landlord; they’d hear a clank in the middle of the night and turn over in their sleep content in the knowledge that one of Piss Harry’s men was, in a small way, making the world a better-smelling place.
They didn’t wonder what happened to the full buckets, but Harry King had learned something that can be the key to great riches: there is very little, however disgusting, that isn’t used somewhere in some industry. There are people out there who want large quantities of ammonia and saltpetre. If you can’t sell it to the alchemists then the farmers probably want it. If even the farmers don’t want it then there is nothing, nothing, however gross, that you can’t sell to the tanners.
Harry felt like the only man in a mining camp who knows what gold looks like.
He started taking on a whole street at a time, and branched out. In the well-to-do areas the householders paid him, paid him to take away night soil, the by-now established buckets, the horse manure, the dustbins and even the dog muck. Dog muck? Did they have any idea how much the tanners paid for the finest white dog muck? It was like being paid to take away squishy diamonds.
Harry couldn’t help becoming rich. The world fell over itself to give him money. Someone, somewhere, would pay him for a dead horse or two tons of prawns so far beyond their best-before date it couldn’t be seen with a telescope, and the most wonderful part of all that someone had already paid him to take them away. If anything absolutely failed to find a buyer, not even from the cats-meat men, not even from the tanners, not even from Mr Dibbler himself, there were the mighty compost heaps downstream of the city, where the volcanic heat of decomposition made fertile soil (‘10p a bag, bring your own bag . . .’) out of everything that was left including, according to rumour, various shadowy businessmen who had come second in a takeover battle (‘. . . brings your dahlias up a treat’).
He’d kept the woodpulp-and-rags business closer to home though, along with the huge vats that contained the golden foundations of his fortune, because it was the only part of his business that his wife Effie would talk about. Rumour had it that she had also been behind the removal of the much admired sign over the entrance to his yard, which said: H. King – Taking the Piss Since 1961. Now it read: H. King – Recycling Nature’s Bounty. [TT]
Kings, of Ankh-Morpork. The named ones have included:
Aguinna IV (Queen) [MAA]
ARTOROLL
O
Cirone IV [MAA]
Coanna (Queen) [MAA]
LORENZO the Kind
Paragore [MAA]
Tyrril [MAA]
Veltrick III [MAA]
Webblethorpe the Unconscious [MAA]
Kite, the. Flying machine devised by LEONARD of QUIRM to transport him, Captain CARROT, and RINCEWIND (oh, and the LIBRARIAN) into orbit around the Disc in order to travel to CORI CELESTI during the events of The Last Hero. It resembled a huge, wooden eagle and had functional wooden wings so that it could glide or swoop, given appropriate winds and thermals. Its main power to achieve its amazing journey, however, came from the segmented Salmon of Thunder it carries in its claws; this fish-shaped construction contained arrays of dragons facing movable mirror mechanisms to get them to flame on demand and provide the motive force to get the Kite into orbit around the Disc. [TLH]
Klatch. The name of both an individual country and the great mysterious continent, between the CIRCLE SEA and the Rim Ocean, which is its hinterland. Klatch too once had an empire and ruled, more or less, the greater part of the continent. Hence the name has lingered on, at least as far as the people of Ankh-Morpork are concerned.
It has to be said that the words ‘Klatch’ and ‘Klatchian’ are used by people of the STO PLAINS as practically interchangeable with ‘foreign’, in the same way that the fierce D’reg nomads in the Klatchian desert use the words ‘foreigner’ and ‘traveller’ interchangeably with the word ‘target’.
The sovereign countries of TSORT, DJELIBEYBI, EPHEBE and even OMNIA are all on the Klatchian coast.
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