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Klatchian Mist
From Discworld & Pratchett Wiki
What we would call an "eminence grise" (i.e. the power behind the throne). Although Vimes wouldn't call it that. He doesn't use words like that.
It has other meanings too, but they all boil down to things we can't see but know are there.
"the Fifth Elephant as a metaphor also exists in the Überwaldean languages. Depending on context, it can mean a thing that does not exist, as we would say "Klatchian Mist"; a thing that is other than it seems, and a thing that while unseen, controls events (in the same way that we would use the term eminence grise)." (The Fifth Elephant, Corgi PB, pp 88-89)
Annotation
The term eminence grise was coined about François Leclerc du Tremblay, the right hand man of the real power behind the throne of Louis XVI, Cardinal Richelieu.
This is another of those interetingly multi-level puns where one entendre does the work of two or three. On Roundworld, the phrase Scotch Mist can denote many things: a mirage, perhaps, a thing seen that isn't physically there. It can be rumour with little or no grounding in fact; it can be something of which the cynical may grunt "I'll believe 'that' when it happens"; or it may be deliberately spread misinformation.
German has a similar phrase: nacht und nebel, or "night and fog", to denote a similar confusion brought about by conflicting aims and expectations with little hard fact to underpin them. In the Nazi era, people taken away at three in the morning for a cosy chat with the Gestapo were said to have dissappeared into night and fog. A military weapon was actually called the nebelwerfer, or fog-thrower: it was a multi-barrelled artillery piece designed, among other things, to put up a very dense smokescreen very quickly. And smokescreens brings us to yet another layer of meaning: deliberate deception and misinformation to conceal what is true and divert attention to the false. "It's all done with smoke and mirrors", as the stage magician said...
