Time. The idea that time is something that passes uniformly at every point in the universe has long been discredited but humans persist in believing that it is so at a local level; yet most people have encountered days that pass very quickly or hours that trudge past (random time variations, like lumps or bubbles in custard) and have been to places where time flows faster/slower than at home.
Time is one of the Discworld’s most secretive anthropomorphic personifications. It is hazarded that Time is female (she waits for no man) but she has never been seen in the mundane world, having always gone somewhere else just a moment before. In her chronphonic castle, made up of endless glass rooms, she does at, er, times materialise as a tall woman with dark hair and wearing a long red-and-black dress. She has a relationship with Lobsang LUDD and Jeremy CLOCKSON. [TOT]
Times, Ankh-Morpork. Ankh-Morpork’s first real newspaper, started by Gunilla GOODMOUNTAIN and William DE WORDE and located behind the BUCKET in Gleam Street. Its banner motto is (usually) ‘The Truth Shall Make Ye Free’. [TT]
Tinker. A tinker in Lancre. A member of the Lancre Morris Men. [LL]
T’malia, Lady. A tutor at the ASSASSINS’ GUILD. She lectures in Political Expediency on Octeday afternoons and is one of the few women to have achieved high office in the Guild.
The jewellery of one hand alone carries enough poison to inhume a small town. She is stunningly beautiful, but with the calculated beauty that is achieved by a team of skilled artists, manicurists, plasterers, corsetières and dressmakers, and three hours’ solid work every morning. [P]
Toad. This toad had once been a lawyer (a human lawyer; toads manage without them) who’d been turned into a toad by a fairy godmother who’d intended to turn him into a frog but had been a bit hazy on the difference. Now he lives in the Feegle mound, where he eats worms and helps them out with the difficult thinking. [HFOS, etc.]
Toby. A goblin dog, previously owned by Chas SLUMBER. [TOC]
Tockley, Lucy. (See DIAMANDA.)
Tomjon. Adopted son of Olwen and Mrs VITOLLER; half brother to the FOOL. Tomjon’s real mother was the Queen of lancre but his real father was also the Fool’s father (a fact known only to the LANCRE witches and, one assumes, his mother).
He was given three gifts by Granny Weatherwax, Nanny OGG and Magrat GARLICK: to make friends well, to always remember the words and to be whoever he thinks he is. With the benefit of these three gifts he carved out a career as a very successful actor. It was so successful and personally fulfilling that he later turned down the crown of Lancre on the grounds that he could wear a different crown on stage every night. [WS]
Tooth Fairy. The Tooth Fairy lives in the highest room of the Tower of Teeth in ‘her’ own land (although the sex of the Tooth Fairy is uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant).
The country itself is similar to that of Death, whose gloomy surroundings were initially defined by the expectations of the people he deals with. Death’s land, therefore, tends to look funereal. That of the Tooth Fairy, on the other hand, was defined by children and is all primary colours and rather inexpertly drawn. If you ever visit, try not to look at the gap between the ground and the sky.
The Fairy herself has origins that go back a lot further than any pleasant little custom about paying children for their lost milk teeth. Like most pleasant little customs involving children, it is a fossil of something a lot more serious and undoubtedly nastier.
The Tooth Fairy herself does not do the collecting, but has set up a self-sustaining system involving humans, with an investment portfolio to provide cash for tooth purchase. For most of the people concerned, it is just a job. Human ‘tooth fairies’ collect the teeth and replace them with money, and a network of middlemen get the teeth to the Tower.
Typically, a working ‘tooth fairy’ is a young woman looking for a better job. The pay is not high. While at work she is invisible to anyone with normal human vision, and must be strong enough to carry a ladder and reach difficult windows. Pliers are a less obvious tool, but are necessary because the books must balance; if, at the end of a busy night, she can no longer make change for a tooth, she must remove another one. [SM, H]
Towering, Sergeant. A member of the 1st Battalion of the Zlobenian 59th Bowmen. Dark green uniform. [MR]
Tower of Art. The oldest building on the Disc. Older than Unseen University in whose grounds it stands, older than the city which formed about it like scree around a mountain. Maybe even older than geography. There was a time when the continents were different . . . Perhaps the tower was washed up on the waves of rock, from somewhere else. Maybe it was even there before the Disc itself. It is useless to speculate. It was certainly the original University.
It is 800 feet tall and now totally without windows. Time, weather and indifferent repairs have given it a gnarled appearance, like a tree that has seen too many thunderstorms. It is topped by a forest of little turrets and crenellations. Its crumbling stones support thriving miniature forests high above the city’s rooftops. Entire species of beetles and small mammals have evolved up there and, aided by the emanations of magic from the University, have evolved very strangely indeed.
The small door in its base leads to the foot of the famous spiral staircase of 8,888 very tiny steps. The interior smells of antiquity, with a slight suspicion of raven droppings. The tower is not now used for anything – the internal floors have rotted away so that all that is left inside is the staircase. From the top a wizard might see the edge of the Disc (after spending ten minutes or so coughing horribly, of course).
T’Phon, Great. One of the four giant elephants who support the Discworld. [COM]
Traitor, Miss. Teaches Logic at the Quirm College for the Daughters of Gentlefolk. [SM]
Treacle Mine Road, Ankh-Morpork. A major road separating the SHADES from the largely dwarfish community in the Cable Street – Easy Street area. Named after the treacle mines once found in the area, now abandoned.
It has always been assumed that the treacle (note to Americans and other rare and strange creatures: a thickly sweet syrupy substance) is the remains of thickets of sugar cane crushed by mud at about the same time as coal measures were being laid down. It was – and still is, in some parts of the Disc – mined either as a solid, which has to be cleaned and refined and cast in slabs (‘pig treacle’ or ‘hokey-pokey’) and, very rarely, as a liquid. In the area around GENUA, liquid treacle lakes near the surface have absorbed enough moisture to ferment naturally, giving rise to occasional springs of rum as the results burst forth under pressure.
Lest it be thought this is far-fetched, treacle mines have been reported in a number of places in England (including Binsey, near Oxford, and Bisham, near Marlow).
Treason, Miss Eumenides. A very elderly witch – 113 years old (actually 111, but she thinks it sounds adolescent). She went blind when she was sixty, and has bandages over her pearly grey eyes. She uses Borrowing to see, using the eyes of animals. She went deaf at the age of seventy-five, and uses Borrowing to the same effect to overcome this. Her knees click when she walks – which she does very fast, with her black cloak billowing around her, with the aid of two sticks. She has long white hair, no hooked nose and all her own teeth; she smells like old locked wardrobes. Miss Treason is a big believer in the power of rumour, advertising and ‘show’. She owns a heavy, rusty iron clock which she wears on a belt and which locals believe is her ‘real’ heart. She is also a big customer of the Boffo Joke Emporium. [W]
Treatle. A wizard. Once Vice-Chancellor (a post now in abeyance) of Unseen University and a mage of the Ancient and Truly Original Brothers of the Silver Star. He has bushy eyebrows and a nicotine-stained patriarchal beard; these, combined with his nice green waterproof tobacco pouch, curly boots and spangled robe, make Treatle a wizard’s wizard. Generally considered as self-centred as a tornado. He is also regarded as being stupid in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid. [ER]
Troglodyte Wanderer. A rather sad and bewildered ghost who haunted L
ANCRE CASTLE because it was built on his burial mound and he hadn’t got the faintest idea where he was. [WS]
Troll’s Head, The. A tavern in the SHADES, Ankh-Morpork. Not a nice place. The Mended DRUM is also not a nice place, but it is a lot nicer than the Troll’s Head, which isn’t nice at all. It still has, nailed on a pole over the door, the original genuine troll head. Here may be found the kind of people too nasty even to be tolerated in the Mended Drum. Think about that.
Trolls. Trolls are a (usually) silicareous but humanoid life-form, largely found in the RAMTOPS but increasingly migrating to Ankh-Morpork and other cities of the STO PLAINS. They are traditionally a strong, hardy and incredibly long-lived race. And proverbially, and quite unfairly, considered to be as thick as two short thick wooden things.
In the cold air of the mountains, trolls are in fact quite bright, almost cunning; only in the lowlands are they a byword for stupidity. In fact the slowness of thought is induced by the effect of heat on the silicon troll brain. If sufficiently deep frozen, a troll is astonishingly intelligent.
It is widely believed that trolls turn to stone in daylight. In fact they are stone all the time. But many trolls have brains that are so close to the heat tolerance level for operation that even the slight heating effect of early-morning light is sufficient to cause them to shut down.
Conception and birth roughly parallel the same occupations among humans, but trolls do not die except by accident or design. Left to themselves, trolls get bigger and slower and tend to settle in one place and think, very slowly and deliberately, about Things. They become more and more rock-like, a process that may take thousands of years. At some point they stop thinking, possibly because they have reached a kind of conclusion, but by then their thoughts are so slow that they are taking place against a geological time-scale.
Even so, there is nothing subtle about trolls. While they cannot digest a human being, they have traditionally been very reluctant to accept this fact. And hitting another troll over the head with a rock is about equivalent to two humans exchanging the time of day. Troll courtship consists of a male troll, after consulting the intended’s father, hitting her as hard as he can. This is in order to demonstrate the strength necessary to support a growing family. In deference to trollish femininity, he will normally select a pretty rock to do this with.
Their relationship with rural humans is generally on the rob-the-henhouse, jump-out-and-stomp, one-to-one basis. Between trolls and dwarfs, however, possibly because they tend to occupy the same landscape, there is a chronic state of low-grade warfare. The reason is possibly that dwarfs, who are miners and masons, sometimes use as their raw material trolls who have settled down for the long think. It is a tolerant troll indeed who can contemplate with equanimity his grandfather functioning as someone else’s fireplace. Like the very best feuds, however, it really continues because it has always continued and its origins are lost in the dawn of time.
Or the sunset of time. Trolls believe that they move through time backwards. You can see the past, they say, therefore it must be in front of you. The future is invisible and therefore behind you.
Trolls have a socio-political system based on the concept of the troll with the biggest rock. Trolls have some difficulty in adjusting to city conditions, because what is a quiet discussion to them is a riot to humans. Unlike dwarfs, who have a far more established civic culture, they don’t fit easily into human houses or eat the same food. They tend to get the messy jobs. But recent experience in the great melting pot of Ankh-Morpork indicates that, with a little understanding on both sides, trolls and dwarfs can put aside their differences and settle down to trade, commerce, theft, usury (theft from bears), tax avoidance and other human pastimes.
Although the term ‘troll’ is strictly speaking reserved for silicon-based bipeds of the I’ve-got-dis-big-club-wid-a-nail-in-it persuasion, there are also other life forms of sufficiently troll-like characteristics to be considered as trolls. Sea trolls are animate sea water. The ICE GIANTS of the Hub must also be considered as a kind of troll, as must the artificially created GOLEMS.
It would be perverse of Nature to allow only the evolution of humanoid trolls and, while Nature is indeed perverse, there are other non-sapient (allowing for the moment that humanoid trolls are sapient) creatures that come under the broad stone umbrella of trolldom, although these are rare. There are troll dogs, and something roughly equivalent to a horse is used in the deep fastnesses of the mountains. There are also, surprisingly enough, troll ducks. They sink a lot.
Trooper, Daniel, ‘One Drop’. Ankh-Morpork City Hangman. [GP]
Trousers of Time, the. There is probably a law, or at least a pretty strict guideline, that says that every book with the word ‘Chaos’, ‘Time’ or ‘Fractal’ in the title must, on some page, include an illustration of the Trousers of Time, viz.:
The trousers are used to demonstrate for very slow people the bifurcating nature of Time – how, for example, one simple choice can cause the universe to branch off into two separate realities (This One, and the One You Should Have Been In Where the Bus Wasn’t About To Hit You).
On the Discworld, where metaphor can become interchangeable with reality, the Trousers of Time may actually exist. Where they are, and who will eventually wear them, and whether this has anything to do with the phrase ‘Time Flies’, may one day be revealed. Or not.
Truckle the Uncivil. Member of the Silver Horde. Had ‘LOVE’ and ‘HATE’ written on his walking sticks, and had yet to master the art of uttering a sentence without at least one *%$*! expletive in it. [IT, TLH]
Trymon, Ymper. A wizard. One-time second in command to the ARCHCHANCELLOR. Became Head of the Order of the Silver Star on the death of Galder WEATHERWAX, but had quite a short reign. A tall, nervous young man, whose personal habits are recalled only to the extent that he fussed about his hair and used all manner of magical spells and potions to get it to grow properly. He did not smoke – quite against the fashion among wizards at the time – and found solace instead in organisational charts that showed lots of squares with arrows pointing to lots of other squares. He was the sort of man who could use the word ‘personnel’ and mean it. [LF]
Tshup Aklathep. The Infernal Star Toad with A Million Young. Tortures its victims to death by holding them down and showing them pictures of its children until their brains implode. Probably an escapee from the Dungeon Dimensions who maintains a precarious existence on this plane. [MP]
Tsort. A desert kingdom on the continent of KLATCH. A neighbour of DJELIBEYBI and an historical enemy of EPHEBE. Tsort is known for the silent marshes of the Tsort river and the GREAT PYRAMIDS, although it has to be pointed out that pyramid building belonged to a much earlier phase of the country’s history and – no doubt because of the example of nearby Djelibeybi – modern Tsorteans scorn the things. The ancient city of Tsort was put to the torch by, it is thought, the armies of Ephebe under LAVAEOLUS. The people of Tsort worship all manner of gods, some of which seem to have been built of all the bits the creators of other gods had left over. Tsortean food relies heavily on garlic.
Tsort, River. The chocolate brown, slow-moving waters of the River Tsort bisect the desert Rimwards of AL KHALI. Famed in myth and lies, it insinuates its way through the brown landscapes like a long, damp descriptive passage punctuated with sandbanks. And every sandbank is covered with sunbaked logs, most of which have teeth. [S]
Tubelcek, Father. A very thin, very decrepit priest who lived in an old house on Misbegot Bridge, and a harmless student who, unfortunately, died a horrible death. [FOC]
Tubul. One of the four giant elephants that support the Discworld. [COM]
Tugelbend, Victor. A student wizard at Unseen University, and possibly the laziest person in the history of the world. Originally, Victor chose to remain a student as a means of avoiding the realities of life and of securing an inheritance. (An uncle left him an annuity to allow him to study as a wizard but, being no fool, stipulated in his will that the annuity would
cease if Victor ever got less than eighty in the examinations, the pass mark being eighty-eight. Victor therefore devoted tremendous effort to studying, in order to ensure that in every exam he achieved exactly eighty-four; on one occasion he successfully appealed when a mistake in the marking awarded him ninety-one points.)
Despite his aversion to anything that appeared to resemble work, Victor was the most athletically inclined student in UU. He has a thin moustache and smiles a lot, in a faintly puzzled way, which gives the impression that he is more intelligent than he really is. He seems to amble everywhere, even when running.
He went on to make a short career in moving pictures, using the stage name Victor Maraschino. His current whereabouts are unknown, except that he is certain to be doing something he likes and devoting tremendous physical and mental effort to the pursuit of laziness. [MP]
Tulip, Mr. Member of the New Firm, with Mr PIN. Also, briefly, known as Sister Jennifer. He lived his life on that thin line most people occupy just before they haul off and hit someone with a spanner. For Mr Tulip, anger was the ground state of his being.
Mr Tulip, possibly from Überwald, did not have an intellect so much as a rage. Despite years of trying he had not managed to acquire a drugs habit because he had not, in fact, managed to acquire any real drugs, although the various horse pills, bath salts, powdered moth balls and other fakes sold to him by chancy dealers probably did, in combination, make him see things. He was also, despite a vocabulary in which the word ‘—ing’ was made to shoulder most of the load, one of the worlds’ finest connoisseurs of fine art.
He was a huge man with a lot of self-inflicted scar tissue. It was hard to see his eyes, due to a certain puffiness, probably caused by too much enthusiasm for chemicals, which might also explain the general blotchiness and the thick veins that stood out on his forehead. He was the sort of heavy-set man who was on the verge of bursting out of his clothes and, despite his interest in and knowledge of fine art, projected the image of a would-be wrestler who had failed the intelligence test.
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