Vetinari, Lord. A graduate of and now Provost of Assassins at the Guild of ASSASSINS. Supreme ruler of the city of Ankh-Morpork, to which he is totally devoted. Tall, thin, bearded and generally to be seen wearing black. He has walked with a stick since the events of Men at Arms. He is believed to be about the same age as Commander VIMES.
He is the most recent of a line of unelected heads (see PATRICIAN, OFFICE OF). As their names suggest, these were not wholly pleasant or well-balanced men and soon met their ends, as did a red-hot poker in the case of one particularly unpopular ruler. Lord Vetinari, on the other hand, is very, very sane. And still alive.
He appears to have survived by being equally distrusted and disliked by all interest groups in the city but also by carefully not being as unpopular as every interest group is to all the others.
A popular form of punishment and mass entertainment in the reign of Mad Lord SNAPCASE was the tearing to pieces of criminals by teams of wild horses. Lord Vetinari appeared to be like the man in the middle of the arena who had managed somehow to chain all the wild horses to one another and is groaning theatrically while watching them drag one another to their knees. The result, in political terms, is stability achieved by equal tension in all directions.
His genius lies in the realisation that everyone craves stability even more than they hunger after justice or truth. Even revolutionary anarchists want stability, so that they have breathing space to fight their real enemies, i.e., those higher than themselves in the revolutionary anarchist council, and those heretics whose definition of revolutionary anarchy differs from their own by about half a sentence in paragraph 97 of the charter.
This policy is dimly perceived by the more intelligent Guild leaders in the city. Yet when an assassination attempt was last made (Men at Arms), the ASSASINS’ GUILD themselves were prominent in the search for the perpetrator. Annoying as the Patrician is, it is so easy to think of someone worse. Technically, Vetinari seems to have given in to every demand of every Guild for years, so the Guilds are driving themselves mad wondering why he is therefore still in charge.
It has been remarked that if the Patrician were thrown to a pack of wolves he would, after chatting to them for a few minutes, have them tearing one another to shreds. It is certainly the case that when he was thrown into one of his own rat-infested, scorpion-filled dungeons [GG] he organised the rats to eat the scorpions and then to bring him food and reading matter. He’d also, years before, secreted a key to the dungeon behind a secret slab. As he wrote in his unpublished MS entitled The Servant, a sort of handbook for the politically ambitious: ‘Never build a dungeon that you cannot get out of.’
He is entirely without vices in any normal sense of the word. If he had any, we can be sure some Guild or other would have made use of them by now.
It is true that he has banned street theatre and hangs mime artists upside down in a scorpion pit opposite a sign that says ‘Learn The Words’, but this may be considered an excusable peccadillo or possibly an amusing character trait. He did have a small and very old terrier, called Wuffles, to which he was said to be quite attached.
Probably his greatest enemy is Commander Sir Samuel VIMES of the City WATCH but, strangely, the person with whom he gets on best – or least badly – is Captain CARROT Ironfoundersson of the same Watch. They share the same obsessive interest in the city itself.
Lord Vetinari lives in what was once the royal family’s Winter Palace in Morpork (the summer palace is a long way from the city, and the reason will easily be appreciated by anyone who has spent a summer near the river). He manages the city either from a wooden seat at the foot of the steps on which is the ancient golden throne of the city, or more usually from the Oblong Office, high in the palace.
This is where he gathers information. People tell him things, for all sorts of reasons. He has a bedroom. He presumably sleeps.
Lord Vetinari has expressed a wish that, one day, he could retire and cultivate a garden. It will probably never happen. It is impossible to imagine him as a mere civilian. But if he did indeed take up horticulture, the roses would grow in lines, the garden would bloom on command – and the slugs would eat the caterpillars.
Vimes, Lady Sybil Deirdre Olgivanna. Maiden name Ramkin: family motto: NON SVMET NVLLVS PRO RESPONSO. Coat of arms: a dragon vert, guardant passant, on a field, gules. The whole encaged by bars, sable.
Lady Sybil Ramkin was the richest woman in Ankh-Morpork.
The estate is worth seven million dollars a year. The Ramkin family own about a tenth of Ankh and extensive properties in Morpork, plus other considerable farm lands.
Although there are a few gaga old uncles and some distant cousins so far removed as to be confiscated, she is for practical purposes the last survivor of one of the oldest families in Ankh.
Sybil is a toweringly big lady, with a mass of chestnut hair (a wig – no one who has much to do with dragons keeps their own hair for long). The Ramkins have never bred for beauty, they’ve bred for healthy solidity and big bones, and Lady Sybil is the shining result. Her ballgowns are usually light blue – to combine the maximum of quiet style with the minimum of visibility. She is large and kind, and she’s can’t lie – she goes red when she tries. However, she can refrain from telling the truth with clear-eyed honesty that can fool experts.
Until quite recently, she has apparently confined her own personal breeding to swamp dragons, which she keeps in pens behind the house, and she is the tower of strength behind the SUNSHINE SANCTUARY FOR SICK DRAGONS. For dragon handling, she wears huge and fearsomely padded armour. She is the author of several self-published volumes on the diseases of the dragon, which is a fruitful and probably endless field of study. This activity may well take second place since she is now the proud mother of Samuel Vimes jnr, but you never know.
Before her marriage to Commander VIMES of the City WATCH and Duke of Ankh-Morpork, she lived alone, apart from thirty-seven dragons and a butler, in the family’s town house in Scoone Avenue, Ankh, where she occupied three rooms out of the available thirty-four. It was and is a rather pleasant old house with well-designed gardens, owing to one of Lady Ramkin’s ancestors shooting ‘Bloody Stupid’ JOHNSON in the leg when the unfortunate man tried to walk up the drive one day.
Prior to her marriage, both house and gardens were in a state of some disrepair, but a full staff is now employed and Lady Sybil is once again surfacing in Ankh-Morpork society like a submarine in a boating lake. The house is easily identified from the road by the stone dragons on the gateposts.
Vimes, His Grace Sir Samuel, Commander. Duke of Ankh and head of the Ankh-Morpork City WATCH. Badge No.177. An upright and honest man whose appointment as head of the despised Night Watch – regarded by all sensible people as a completely useless appendage to the running of the city – may have been the cause of his drinking problem. But it has also been suggested that he is in fact naturally more sober than other people (to put it technically, he is slightly KNURD).
It is known that he was born in Cockbill Street in the SHADES, that his father was Thomas Vimes and his grandfather was Gwillaim Vimes. In his younger years, he was a member of the Cockbill Street Roaring Lads. Membership of the Watch was a family tradition and Samuel claims to have joined the Watch shortly after leaving school. However, since he was in his late teens when he joined the Watch this means he was either a very slow learner or is delicately avoiding the subject of juvenile street gangs, where he is believed to have picked up some of his fighting techniques.
Initially, Vimes never got the hang of ambition and worked his way sideways rather than up, and his promotion to captain was simply the result of the sheer unthinkability of promoting any other watchman.
By his own account he was a skinny, balding, unshaven collection of bad habits marinated in alcohol, although these days he is better shaved and doesn’t drink. Partly as a result of this latter fact, he is morose, cynical and ridiculously – and to his own embarrassment – soft-hearted in certain circumstances.
He is almost certainly one of Nature’s policemen; it has been said of him that his soul burns to arrest the Creator of the universe for getting it wrong.
He loathes kings and aristocrats in general, despite the fact that he is, now, one of them. In fact, in his earlier life, Vimes was almost defined by what he disliked, and that included the undead, Assassins, trolls, dwarfs and the human race. These days, with undead, dwarfs and trolls all working well in the Watch, he seems to have mellowed considerably and may even have come to terms with the human race. He still draws the line at vampires, however.
Recent years have seen the universe play a huge joke on Vimes. He was promoted to Commander, knighted against his will and made a Duke by Lord VETINARI; in most cases his acceleration up the ranks of privilege has been part of a package to improve the standing of the Watch as a whole, but he still resents it. He also married Lady Sybil RAMKIN, who is part of no package at all, and he is now so rich he doesn’t know how rich he is. He nevertheless likes to shave himself using his granddad’s cut-throat razor.
For several years, he had a price on his head with the ASSASSINS’ GUILD (getting as high as $600,000) but this has now been put into abeyance. It is suspected that this is because, like Vetinari, he is considered more useful to the city alive than he would be dead. (The Assassins’ Guild don’t mind rocking the boat but draw the line at drilling holes in the hull, as it were.)
He was once blackboard monitor at school for a whole term. This fact seems to really impress dwarfs.
Vimes, ‘Old Stoneface’. Commander of the City WATCH who beheaded – because no one else would do it – the last King of Ankh-Morpork, LORENZO THE KIND ‘and led the city’s militia in a revolt against the rule of a tyrannical monarch’. It is thought that he may well have been a relative of Sam VIMES. This possibility is one secretly cherished by Vimes, as is the fact that the nickname is sometimes applied to him by his men.
The act of regicide was followed by six months under the rule of Stoneface and his efficient if unimaginative soldiers known colloquially as the ‘Ironheads’. He was later hanged, dismembered and buried in five graves by a grateful city. Samuel Vimes embraces the cynical belief that Old Stoneface tried to introduce democracy to the city, and that the people voted against it. Certainly for much of the chronicles he has been a footnote to history, and not talked about in polite historical circles; when the ‘Peeled Nuts’ (the Ankh-Morpork Historical Re-creation Society) staged episodes from the Civil War, no one ever wanted to play him. However, as yet another incentive for Vimes to accept promotion, Lord Vetinari has arranged for the role of Old Stoneface in the city’s history to be ‘reassessed’ by the Guild of Historians, who rewrite history all the time in any case.
There was something else . . . Oh, yes. He had warts and all. [MAA]
Vimes, Sybil. See VIMES, LADY SYBIL DEIRDRE OLGIVANNA.
Vimes, Young Sam. Son of Sam and Sybil.
Vincent, Old. A member of the Silver Horde prior to the events of The Last Hero. [IT]
Vincent the Invulnerable. Committed suicide by walking into the Mended DRUM and announcing that he was called Vincent the Invulnerable. [SM]
Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets. Also, in Ankh-Morpork, known as Visit-The-Ungodly-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets (‘infidel’ can get you a thick ear.) A constable in the Ankh-Morpork City WATCH, usually just known as Visit, or by his nickname of Washpot. He is a good, conscientious and methodical copper who instinctively respects authority. He doesn’t have many friends, perhaps because he has a pathological interest in evangelical religion. He is an Omnian, who in his spare time goes round door-to-door pamphleting with his friend Smite-The-Unbeliever-With-Cunning-Arguments. He spends all his wages on pamphlets and now has his own printing press. The almost genetic Omnian disposition towards envangelism has, in these more relaxed times, moved away from burning people at the stake to merely shouting at them through their letter boxes.
Vitoller, Mrs. Wife of Olwyn VITOLLER, the actor. An intelligent-looking woman with bottomless reserves of patience and organisational ability. And nimble fingers, which she needs in order to get the seat money before Olwyn drinks it. [WS]
Vitoller, Olwyn. Manager of a band of strolling players. Large and fat, with an impressive moustache and a nose that might hide successfully in a bowl of strawberries. Aged sixty, he is the owner of a rich, golden brown and powerful voice. He wears a ragged jerkin, holey tights and a moth-eaten hat. [WS, LL]
Volfssonssonssonsson, Volf. Volf the Lucky. A youngish Vasung warrior from the Hublands. Since he is never seen alive, and even when dead is a man of many parts, the name is probably misplaced. [SM]
Vorbis, Deacon. Head of the QUISITION in Kom, OMNIA. An exquisitor (like an inquisitor, only a lot more so). Well over six feet tall, with a mild, aquiline face and a body seemingly just skin stretched over bone. He looks like a normally proportioned person modelled in clay by a child and then rolled out.
His ancestors came from one of the desert tribes; he had dark eyes – not just dark of pupil, but almost black of eyeball. This made it very hard to tell where he was looking, because he was apparently wearing sunglasses under his skin.
Vorbis was bald, as were many of the Church of OM’S senior members, but Vorbis was bald by design. He shaved all over. He gleamed. He wore a plain grey hooded robe, under which he wore a singlet with nails sewn into it, and carried a steel-shod staff.
He didn’t menace. He didn’t threaten. He just gave everyone the feeling that his personal space radiated several yards from his body, so that superiors fifty years his senior felt it necessary to apologise about interrupting whatever it was he might be thinking about. Had he not stayed in the Quisition, he could easily have been an archpriest or even an Iam. But he didn’t worry about that kind of trivia.
His goal was to become the Superior Iam of the Church, an ambition he achieved for the space of ten minutes. Possibly the most terrifying thing about him was that he was quite genuinely not ambitious for himself. He believed that he was what the Church needed. [SG]
Vortin. Troll dentist and owner of a diamond warehouse in Ankh-Morpork. [SM]
Vul nut. A re-annual plant. Ghlen Livid is made from the fermented vul nut drink they freeze-distil in the AGATEAN EMPIRE. Vul nut wine is particularly exceptional in that it can mature as many as eight years prior to its seed actually being sown. Vul nut wine is reputed to give certain drinkers an insight into the future which is, from the nut’s point of view, the past. [COM]
Vyrt. Brother-in-law of King Tepicymon XXVII. An assassin; his influence probably resulted in Teppic being sent out of Djelibeybi to be educated. [P]
Wa, Cripple. A beggar who frequented the Pearl Dock, Ankh-Morpork. Well renowned for his floating crap game, which occasionally, owing to its closeness to the dock, resulted in the floating, or at least the gentle bobbing, of participants unmannerly enough to win; he was skilled at switching dice and once diced with DEATH. In person. He had twenty-three people murdered, but did not consider that this in itself meant he was a bad person. [COM, M]
Waddy. Constable on the old city Watch when Sam VIMES first joined up. [NW]
Waggon, Lady Deirdre. Author of a book on etiquette. Very necessary in Ankh-Morpork. In a society that includes professional assassins and thieves, the seating arrangements at dinner can take some very careful working out. [MAA]
Wahoonie. A vegetable that grows only in certain parts of HOWONDALAND, where it typically reaches twenty feet in length. It is covered in spikes the colour of earwax, and smells like an anteater that’s eaten a very bad ant. Its flavour is prized by connoisseurs and makes everyone else want to be sick. It is banned in many of the cities of the STO PLAINS. Ankh-Morpork is affectionately known as the Great Wahoonie, in the same way that New York is the Big Apple. [MP]
Wallspur. Prophet of the Omnian religion. [SG]
War. One of the Four Horsemen. (His horse is huge and red and the heads of dead warriors hang from the saddle horn.) War is a large, jolly anthro
pomorphic personification, a bit like your old sports teacher in red armour. He does have a habit of losing the thread and not really listening to people. He lives in an ancient long-house which was full of valhallerian carousing and fighting until his marriage to an ex-Valkyrie, who chucked out what she called ‘his no-good friends’ and installed a modern black kitchen range where the fire pit had been.
As with many married men of a certain age, War has installed his memory in his wife’s head (‘Do I like pork?’ ‘No, dear, it gives you wind.’ ‘Oh. I thought I liked it.’ ‘No, dear, you don’t.’ )
Warbeck, Lucy. A young witch and friend of Tiffany Aching. [HFOS]
Watch, the Ankh-Morpork City. Motto: FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC.
Strength (according to pre-republican records): one commander, five captains, ten sergeants of varying seniority, and a total of forty corporals, lance-corporals, constables and lance-constables, plus a ‘city militia’ of varying size, depending on need, made up of civilians.
Together these individuals form the Ankh-Morpork police force. It consisted eventually of four loosely linked organisations: the Night Watch, the Day Ward (which had more or less the same functions, but the jurisdiction was exchanged at dawn and dusk), the Palace Guard and the Cable Street Particulars.
The Particulars are believed to have been quite an elite force and combined the roles of secret service and government (i.e., whoever was in the palace) office of investigation. Under the administration of Lord WINDER, however, they became an instrument of terror and oppression, which resulted in the burning of their Watch House during the Glorious Revolution. Subsequently restored, it is currently a dwarf delicatessen.
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