Any thoughts on Discworld daemons, if you don't mind me asking?
Vimes has a mutt.
Thereâs really not a nicer way to describe her, a bow-legged cross between a terrier and a feral sewer rat, mostly the color of dishwater. And she doesnât really clean upâit becomes more embarrassing after heâs married Sybil, whose pygmy hippo daemon can go from placid river god to defensive bellowing ferocity in seconds flat, and might as well have stepped from the Morpork coat of arms. But even freshly cleaned and trussed in a gold ducal collar, his daemon looks like it was dragged backwards through a nasty bit of the Ankh.
sheâs a patient tracker, though, and a rat-worrier and a sheep-herder and a snarling, protective beastâthere must be some wolf in that mongrel of yours, Wolfgang tells him on that snowy plain, and Vimes figures itâs pretty likely, heâs got a wolf in him too.
Vetinari has a golden orb-weaver, who only occasional deigns to make an appearanceâusually resting on the back of Vetinariâs hand, as if to make a point. (There are heads of guilds with enormous bull daemons who shiver in fear of that little spider, on that pale hand.)
Carrot has a frankly impressive lioness, whose presence made the whole watch-house fall silent the first time Carrot walked in. Vimes had been a little taken aback at the sight of her, gold and somehow not of their world, standing in their grubby and undistinguished midst.
(No one has ever asked Carrot about her, not even Angua, who has her own lovely wolfdog daemon.)
Moist has a mockingbird who perches on his shoulder, the same color as dust and utterly forgettable. (In his old glory days, he would sometimes bring a turtle or mouse with him, hiding her under his hatâsorry, wrong daemon is not an ironclad alibi, but itâs enough of a distraction to run away.) She gets along well with Spikeâs terrifying peregrine, though sheâs a little too excited by the feeling of being snatched out of the air in Moistâs opinion.
William de Worde has a hedgehog, who immediately curled up in a ball when faced with Sacharissa Cripslockâs ermine. (It took a while to get him to relax.)
Witches tend toward catsâor women with cat daemons turn out to be witches, they never quite decided that one. Granny Weatherwax has pure grey cat, utterly unremarkable in every way but that. (She has always been privately disappointed in him, for it. She would have preferred something a little more imposing, more obviously witchyâwhich, of course, is ridiculous, it is choosing that makes a witch, not her nature. But still.)
Nanny has a fat piebald cat whose amorous adventures with other daemons rival Greeboâsâheâs been known to slip off for days, only returning when Nanny is called out. Magrat has a cream shorthair who looks very handsome beside Verenceâsâslightly excitable, a little gracelessâhare. Even Susan, though technically not a witch, has a cat daemon, a sleek black thing that likes to play with the Death of Rats when heâs bored.
Tiffany is among the few witches who doesnât have a cat daemonâhers doesnât settle until she faces the hiver, until she ushers it through the black door to its death. Afterwards, Tiffany Aching knows herself to be a witch, and walks the downs with her sheepdog daemon at her side, her hat full of sky.
Sgt Colin has a mild, pleasant brown toad, a sit-and-see kind of predator. Something with the patience to outlast storms, and droughts, and long frosts. Something with a set territory and a bottomless stomach, something that can launch itself sudden, startling blur to become the last thing the unwary insect ever sees.Â
Nobby Nobbs, wellâ no one actually knows what his daemon is. Sheâs as matted and filthy and scrofulous as the rest of him, a dark, oil-iridescent clot of furâ or are those bristles? or matted feathers?â nestled in between the collar of his breastplate and the dirt-stiff rim of his shirt. Rat? Pigeon? Spider? No one wants to ask. No one wants an answer. Sometimes she will extend one scaly, brittle claw out into the open air, and he will deposit into it a sugar cube, or a coin, or a bright little shard of glass, and sheâ whatever she is whatever sheâs namedâ will retreat into the comfortable hollow of his armor, purring and pleased.Â
She can scream like hell though, and frequently will.Â
Dorfl, of course, has a phoenixâ when he opened his mouth to speak his first word, there she was, a scrap of flame, on his tongue.Â
I love roachpatrolâs thoughts. The image of Dorflâs daemon being born is beautiful.
I think witches would have birds, like in HDM. I see Granny with a goose; Nanny with a robin-red-breast and Magrat with a corn crake. Agnes has a nightingale and Tiffany a curlew.
Through the piping lines of the Unseen University, there are bees.
No one knows where they come from. No one knows what they eat or where they keep their hive; they buzz softly but in a way that it sounds like many mechanical things clicking together, and when they rise all at once, it sounds like the beginning of a voice.
And always, they cluster near the parts of Hex; the tubing that runs through the University like a hermit crab in a shell just right for it, and a careful eye notes that their buzzing matches perfectly to Hexâs eternal noise; the clicking of the clockwork, the tapping of the keys, the steps of the ants.
The students swear they have never seen the bees more than a short distance away from Hex, and always around the senior wizards or the High Energy facility, and they move around Ponder Stibbons like a particularly noisy halo so he looks like an apiary angel.
Mr Stibbons tells the truth when he says there were never any bees until they turned on Hex. And one day, in the moving of the machinery, there arose but just one single perfect bee.
No one knows when the swarm came. Just like no one knows when Hex became something more than the sum of parts.
But when the bees fly and Hex is working, buzz and machinery a duet, it sounds like the voice of a soul.
The undead still have souls, which is why theyâre allowed in the Watch, and by extension integrated into human-dominated society. Reg Shoeâs parrot is a transparent, repetitive thing with a small tinny voice, like the echo of a kitten at the bottom of a tin bath. But thatâs just Reg Shoe.
Of course dwarves have souls; strange ones, but theologically undeniable. There have always been mutters that dwarves steal the souls, or that the strangely-silent animals are actually trained pets; but they do seem satisfyingly dwarvish, the sombre badgers and mole rats and burrowing owls, and they generally donât cause trouble, and one must trade after all.
But Cheeryâs pink fairy armadillo is instantly recognizable as a daemon, and a nicely dwarvish one to human sensibilities, a very small burrowing animal. Though to the dwarves, the fussy little thing with its delicate pink armor and pristine white fur is a slightly embarrassing thing to have on public display. Not only that, but the daemon speaks in public - allowing his high, breathy, querulous voice to be commonly read as male, implying that Cheery is by extension female.
At her interview for the position at the Watch, she gathers her courage in both hands and introduces the daemon to Vimes as
Rozâquerkluftertz
, her heart hammering at the wrongness and intimacy of it. (Vimes helpfully points out the location of the spittoon) and she says âNo, itâs, er, a kind of pink, er, rock,â and Vimesâs face goes all hollow and he sort of stares off into the distance, and she can practically hear the rusty machinery of his brain trying to process this new information on How Not To Be A Racist Prick To The New Diversity Hire into something he can make sense of.
âIs it,â Vimes says finally, the last mental gear clunking into place, where it appears to stick.
âItâs a very pretty sort of rock,â Cheery says humbly, trying to help. âBut quite rare and Iâm sure it hasnât come up in conversation before.â
âNot like gold,â Vimes says sourly.
âProbably not,â Cheery says carefully, trying to avoid the pitfall trap that is talking about gold among dwarves.
Her daemon himself pipes up suddenly in his high, scholarly little voice, and Vimes looks at him in surprise: âRozâquerkluftertz is not considered valuable to dwarves at all, in the sense that gold is inherently valuable; it is,â - and here Rozâquerkluftertz gives his fussy little academic cough, âconsidered hrâazdkha, which is to say, valuable because of its work or properties; namely, in the case of this mineral, being useful to alchemical research, as well as being beautiful, in the homely comfortable sort of way that is rarely reflected in songs. And, of course, pink.â
âNever heard a dwarfâs daemon talk before,â Vimesâs terrier says. Her voice is beautiful, deep and hoarse and husky, like a smoke-broken bar singer.
âWeâre a bit odd,â Cheery says.
âYouâll do,â the terrier says.
âIâve always liked, er, pink,â says Vimes, pitching himself courageously along the conversation, and Cheeryâs heart sort of goes out to him a bit, because you can see that somewhere behind that casually hurtful sneer, in that dark and ill-kempt machine of his brain, the man is trying to be Good with a capital G, and most people donât care that much.
âMe too,â she says, her hand curling around the little tube of Violently Pink Like The Blood Of Thine Enemies lipstick sheâd bought in the market that morning. âIâve always liked pink.â
Someone just liked this post from a million years ago and it reminded me that âRozâquerkluftertzâ was actually some kind of Pune, or Play On Words, and I FORGOT WHAT IT WAS, so I had to back-google it,
and itâs a mashup of the German word Rosenquarz (rose quartz) and the Saxon term âquerkluftertzâ (cross-vein-ore).
THATâS NOT EVEN FUNNY ELODIE WHY DO YOU MAKE SO MUCH WORK FOR YOURSELF???
It IS funny, and witty, and clever. If the peculiar titles and quotations of Mr Nuttâs Ăberwaldean philosophy texts (in âUnseen Academicalsâ) are anything to go by, that sort of mashup would have been right up Terryâs street (RĂŒhrwörtergasse 7a).
This whole sequence is pleasing in many different ways.
If I may:
Trolls, it is commonly believed, donât have daemons. Itâs one of the salient points in the ongoing dwarves vs. dwarves debate, not to mention one of the reasons why humans generally find trolls to be rather unsettling.
Among the trolls, however, it is well known that your soul is something you make, or something given to you, or something you keep on you. It might be your grandfatherâs club or a favorite boulder but itâs something thatâs intrinsically yours.
Detritusâ soul is a special helmet which cools his brain down so that he can think more quickly in the Ankh-Morpork heat. It was made for him by a dwarf, which many trolls feel isnât really *proper* for a trollâs soul, but no one is going to fight him on it. Cuddyâs daemon had put extra special care into helping creating it before they vanished into a cloud of golden Dust.
Rincewindâs daemon is an opossum - a strange little creature that doesnât mesh well with the rest of the world, and would rather run or play dead than fight, but is mean as hell when backed into a corner.
Archancellor Ridcullyâs daemon is a bull moose. Wizards are the sort of fellows who tend to have same-gender daemons as often as they have different-gender daemons. (Because women and wizard magic just donât naturally mix, of course.) The moose is huge, gets in the way pretty much constantly, and really canât be brought down by anything short of the world ending.
Ponder Stibbons has a crow, one of those dangerously intelligent corvids that know how to use tools and can count. She has a sharp wit and often says what Ponder is thinking but would never actually say aloud. Itâs a rather annoying habit, as far as Ponder is concerned.
No one knows what the Librarianâs daemon was before he became ape-shaped, or if she changed at all between then and now. She is, of course, a female orangutan who only says âOok!â and becomes just as angry as the Librarian when someone uses the m-word.
Young Samâs daemon has a habit of mimicking his fatherâs daemon, except quite less scruffy. Sybil has sometimes walked into the nursery and caught all four of them sound asleep, Young Sam on Vimesâs chest and a big-pawed, fluffy golden retriever puppy curled up with the mud-colored mutt.
Death, of course, doesnât have a daemon. Anthropormorphic representations donât. Thereâs no soul there, no personality, he simply is.
So it was a bit awkward when one showed up for him one day.
He tried ignoring it for a bit, in the hopes that it would go away on its own, but it kept following him around all the same.
Albert suggested that it might have been better if it was something a bit more⊠deathly. A raven, maybe, or âa black dog. One of those ones with the red eyes. That woud be good, very fitting. People expect a black dog. Or just anything black reallyâ you canât go wrong with black. But thisâŠâ Death just stared at him in a rather unnerving way, until he stopped talking and suddenly remembered something urgent that he had to go off and do, right now.
Fortunately, most of Deathâs⊠clients⊠are a bit too preoccupied to ask about the snow white kitten with the striking blue eyes that he keeps tucked into his robes.
Cities, in theory, do not have a soul. Cities are Cities. But in theory, anthills donât have souls, either. And the difference between an anthill and a city is the kind of thing that Wizards will cheerfully debate until only one of them still has any voice left and is thus the victor, and also, probably, is also Ridcully (as his champion inability to ever be out-talked is arguably part and parcel to why heâs still kept his seat).Â
But sometimes, Vimes gets to thinking about rats. Heâs never seen anyplace in the city that doesnât have rats. Doesnât matter if itâs Ankh or Morpork, heâs seen as many rats in cramped little broken-cobble alleys as he has grand paved streets. And frankly, the rats you get in *nice* neighborhoods can be far more vicious brutes. Not that the trashed-street types are nice creatures. Just the kind that have escaped every last ratter, or who know how to hide where no one can see or care what theyâve destroyed until itâs too late, who laze on stocks of food left to be expensive, are not animals heâd ever want to be left with his hands tied around.Â
And sometimes, on a very long night and his third cigarette, he thinks about how his wife ânever has the heartâ to abide rat traps being set in their home, because somehow she thinks theyâre âpoor sweet little dearsâ, and, somehow, he could swear, just like everyone else, the rats just canât seem to bear to disappoint her. Somehow while their food may be nibbled on, and there may be an odd hole here and there (which his daemon occasionally snuffles at when Vimes is in an antsy mood or has to go somewhere in any form of neckwear), her faith is rewarded.Â
Sometimes, around about the fourth cigarette, he thinks about how well informed Vetinari is. Even in places where he canât imagine anyone reaching him to talk. Not unless they can move through walls.Â
But he rarely thinks much past that, as heâs usually called away by something, even if itâs a headache.Â
And in the darkness, in all the little spaces, somewhere, everywhere, in the city that never really sleeps, a thousand thousand and thousand more beady little eyes and paws are busy seeing and seeking and exploring, living, and regrettably, pissing just about wherever they see casually fit to.Â
And the turtle swims on.Â
