The Third Lesson: The Great Revolt

The Third Lesson: The Great Revolt The Festival of the Dead is over. As always, the police and the mayor scramble for hasty explanations about all the extra bodies. As always, they tried to cover it up, but amused Sabbat made sure to keep the local media informed, and the corpses made fine front-page news. Andrew reaches up to feel the bishop’s hat given to him on the last night of the festival, marking his triumph over his rivals. Ductus no more — now it’s Bishop Emory, thank you very much. His pleasure in the moment would be complete were it not for the elder standing next to him, surveying the city from the debris of the house they torched in last night’s fire dance.

Brother Oso looks like the bear of his name. He’s half a foot taller than Andrew, with fiery red hair and beard. Thick curly hair covers his arms and hands, the thickest Andrew can recall ever seeing on someone who wasn’t transforming into an animal form. Brother Oso is bulky, but it doesn’t look like there’s any fat or flab there. Andrew remembers quite vividly watching Oso juggle three flaming roof beams, all the while balanced on one foot and using the free foot to keep kicking at the firemen unfortunate enough to be first on the scene.

Oso turns from the panorama to look down at Andrew.

“You have a worthy pack, bishop. If they last, I expect that they’ll be following you on the path to honors.”

“Thank you, sir. I hope so.” Andrew doesn’t know how much deference Oso actually wants, so he aims for a neutral tone open to many interpretations.

“I would like to speak with them before I leave. Do you object?”

“I’d be honored. I take pride in having a pack who understands their world, and whatever you choose to share would no doubt serve that end.”

Oso nods, then casually vaults backward, landing with a twist to face the gathered pack.

Murdering the Father None of you know what it’s like to exist in the presence of a god, or something so powerful that it might as well be a god. You look at your leaders in the Festival and find them intimidating, but not one of them is more than four centuries old. I was the oldest present at the rite, and I am less than a thousand years old myself.

But I know what our founder’s gaze was like, and why it made the great patricide necessary.

You are ambitious creatures. It’s part of your nature, and if you showed no drive to improve your position, you wouldn’t have made it this far. You chafe under the dead hand of those over you, looking at the archbishop or the cardinal and thinking how many decades they’re

likely to stay right where they are. Don’t look surprised.

Remember that it’s difficult to keep secrets from your elders; plan accordingly. But now imagine that your leaders had existed not just for decades but for millennia, that you could at any time find yourself commanded by a creature older than all recorded history. Imagine all your hopes and fears known and dismissed, your plans casually toyed with to suit some scheme older than the language you speak.

The Great Rebel Our clan in its modern form begins with Gratiano de Veronese, scion of a medieval Italian noble family.

He grew up in the early 12th century, in the hothouse of peninsula politics. The German empire ruled the region’s upper half, with the Norman Kingdom of Sicily controlling most of the rest. Religious and civil politics were often one and the same thing, and always interfered with each other.

Gratiano was one ambitious young noble among many. He first made his mark as an articulate preacher, using the bishopric his family bought for him when he was still in his twenties to rouse popular support for family causes. In the guise of righteous anger at noble sins, he skillfully set the mob against inconvenient rivals, generally picking up much of the glory they dropped in their hasty flights. Once the de Veronese family was secure, he turned to wider ranging matters. Specifically, he hoped to assemble an effective coalition that could force the imperial government to grant more autonomy in Italy.

In this he failed, completely. The city-states wouldn’t give up their prerogatives, and all the nobles in the empire chose to pursue their separate advantage rather than cooperate against the enemy in the background.

In a small way, Gratiano’s efforts at inspiring resistance likely contributed to the mid-century extinction of most city-states’ independence. They became sufficiently annoying that the empire and the Norman Sicilians each crushed those within reach. That, however, came later. What mattered at the time — about 1130 — was that Gratiano realized he was not fated to be the next Charlemagne or Pompey. He planned to step back from the national stage to return to the concerns of his own family, after one final visit to the emperor.

It was one visit too many. The de Veroneses felt troubled during his absence, harboring inner doubts about Gratiano’s real worth or intentions. They didn’t think to associate these new fears with the denser-thanusual shadows ranging through their estate, and of course with merely mortal willpower they never would get the chance. All they knew, with increasing certainty, is that Gratiano had offended the family’s honor with his hubris and deserved punishment. Family agents quietly undermined Gratiano’s efforts, as did whispers in the nighttime corridors of empire.

You recognize the secret face of this story. Yes, the Lasombra Antediluvian had taken an interest in Gratiano, feeling that the time had come again for it to make a new childe. It set about ruining his life to test his character, just as our clan does to its potential childer now.

Gratiano responded to the challenges with renewed fervor. It became a point of pride with him to face down opponents and destroy their arguments, humiliating them in front of witnesses. He gained quite a following among dissidents around the imperial throne who felt that Gratiano made much sense when he talked about the benefits to the empire of a more indirect rule in Italy.

Unfortunately for the childe-to-be, his arguments couldn’t penetrate the reinforced mental barriers of the officials who actually had the power to approve or deny his requests. When the vaguely worded summons back home arrived one day, Gratiano found himself forced to admit defeat for the first time in his adult life (at least the first failure of any goal that had become important to him).

The irony here is that Gratiano actually had plotted to betray his family. Bavarian and Bohemian nobles with interests in Italy convinced him to betray his former associates in the Italian autonomy movement in exchange for estates and opportunities in Germany.

Gratiano made no great effort to conceal his growing enjoyment of German custom. He simply concealed how deep the change of sentiment ran.

The failed diplomat returned home to face arrest. His parents accused him of treachery, of plotting to subvert the family’s position through calculated offenses to the empire, which he would then exploit for personal gain.

Quite convincing evidence accompanied the charges.

You know how well some of you can fool mortals; just think what a few thousand years’ practice could do for you. In any event, Gratiano went to jail and the threat of imminent execution.

The Antediluvian came into his cell and spoke with him that night. It was not the Antediluvian’s custom to force the Embrace on anyone. For its own reasons, it wished its childer to ask for the change. Much to its surprise, Gratiano wasn’t initially inclined to accept. He felt sure that he could negotiate his way out of the situation and laid out two fully developed schemes, either of which would suffice for the purpose. Naturally he found the Antediluvian fascinating, and he certainly wanted to learn more about being a Cainite, but he didn’t feel himself so deprived of opportunity that he would want to give up life just yet.

With surprise and a touch of dismay, the Antediluvian withdrew to make other arrangements. The following night it returned to the cell. This time Gratiano did not leap up in surprise, for the torturers had broken both his legs. His eyes did not widen in shock, for they were both swollen shut after repeated beatings. The Antediluvian didn’t need to do much to inspire the de Veronese interrogators to do their worst to the young man — it simply showed them and the family elders proof of Gratiano’s German deals. The Antediluvian now spoke again to Gratiano about the blessings of the Embrace, and this time Gratiano listened more carefully. He realized that mere mortal cleverness wouldn’t serve. With that realization, he accepted the Embrace.

The details of Gratiano’s escape are mundane enough, involving a body altered through blood magic to resemble him and left in his place. What matters is that Gratiano accompanied the Antediluvian to its Sicilian stronghold. As he realized how far the black hand of the clan (and of other clans) reached into the affairs he’d tried to direct as a mortal, he became filled with the desire to topple the Antediluvian just as he hoped to topple the emperor. As his first step, he set about becoming the Antediluvian’s model childe.

Some of you can sense the future, and you’ve seen demonstrations enough to know that stronger oracles exist. It seems ludicrous to believe that the Antediluvian had no inkling of its coming destruction. Several theories prevail as to why it allowed Gratiano to continue.

• Outside support: That is, Gratiano did not act alone. Either another Antediluvian or some other force gave him aid. You’ll hear rumors of infernalists or the spirit-demons of the old Tzimisce domains. Disregard them. They’re ludicrous. You may meet Gratiano yourself some night, and whatever else may be true of him, he does not reek of the infernal or anything like it. As for other manipulators, well, a theory that can explain away all evidence isn’t actually useful at all.

• Suicide: That is, the Antediluvian chose to perish. Perhaps it got bored, perhaps it felt it had atoned for some primal sin or that it never could. Why does anyone ever commit suicide?

• Plan gone awry: That is, the Antediluvian wanted its patricidal childe for some scheme of its own, and Gratiano’s rebellion was a matter of sheer luck on his part, bad luck on his sire’s part, or both. Like the “outside support” theory, this offers no basis for analysis, so in practical terms it’s a religious doctrine.

Whatever the case, the fact is that the Antediluvian accepted Gratiano’s flattery and ignored the elders who whispered to it that he would do in the dark palace what he’d tried to do in Germany. I was myself Embraced

some decades after Gratiano and remember vividly the atmosphere — Gratiano continued to try directing the Italian principalities, now using his powers as well as his native aptitudes. It didn’t work all that well, but he gained valuable experience and became increasingly annoyed with the vampiric hierarchy that blocked him far more thoroughly than any mortal one ever could. We young ones often spoke in the early morning, just before slumber, about the desirability of fresh opportunity. What distinguished Gratiano was that he dared to act on it.

The Era of Revolt I can scarcely describe to you what a horrible era the 14th and 15th centuries were for us as Cainites.

The great plague swept away much of our food and left remaining mortals sparse enough that maintaining our disguises within the mortal world became more difficult.

Meanwhile, Cainites continued to create childer, making more cities crowded to intolerable levels. While the Antediluvians themselves spent more and more time in torpor, far too many Methuselahs remained active to torment us all with unobtainable prestige. While they and their rotten sires ruled, we could expect never to achieve what we felt to be our potential. Violence erupted as generations clashed and as clans forced into competition for valuable kine resources sharpened their antipathy.

To make matters worse, we faced organized mortal opposition on an unprecedented scale. The fools of our kind alerted clerical and civil authorities to our presence. The Inquisition mutated from a random collection of doctrinal questioners into an efficient secret police, capable of ferreting out us and our pawns.

Just as the Inquisition’s ranks swelled, the expanding Ottoman presence — all the way to Vienna, before turning back! — forced eastern European Cainites to flee westward. Their movements and their crowding into others’ cities only made it that much easier for the hunters to find us all.

By my tally, the overwhelming majority of the Cainites who existed in 1350 had perished by 1500, whether at the hands of mortals or Cainites. You can picture nothing like it. You are all too young to remember the 1919 influenza, let alone actual genocide. It was a time in which all saw that we could not continue as before. That was Gratiano’s great contribution.

Gratiano planned while the rest of us fretted and dabbled. He made contacts among the so-called anarchs, listening to their complaints and showing them twin lessons. First, he taught them how to identify and exploit opportunities in whatever their circumstances of the moment happened to be. For most of a century he ran a sort of Socratic academy for anarchs, coverThe Devil in the Details Oso’s account differs in some ways from the ones found in other Vampire books. From the vantage point of the Final Nights, there’s no objective way to establish the truth of the matter. All surviving witnesses and participants claim great certainty of their recollections. Simple tests reveal that they are all telling the truth as they recall it, and that all involved are sure that no mind control, hypnosis or other mental manipulation happened along the way. Nearly all Lasombra know what Dominate feels like, and none of the conflicting accounts shows such traces. Nonetheless, the stories don’t add up.

Cainites interested in Sabbat history deal with discrepancies mostly through selective ignorance and discreet silences. ing mortal and vampiric politics, the use of religious orders, trade and the like. Second, he showed them that however useful these lessons might be, in the end it all came down to the whim of the eldest. In between sessions of his academy, he traveled all over Europe, cultivating new alliances outside the clan. His deals with the Assamites of the Holy Land and the Balkans proved most important for us all.

Sometime around 1400, Gratiano became convinced that he could destroy our Antediluvian. For two full mortal generations he laid his plans. Around the middle of the century, things finally started to happen.

The “Victory Order” and other groups of Lasombra enforcers encountered anarchs with memories of Lasombra elders conspiring with them to commit acts of diablerie.

Some such memories immediately proved false, while others held up to sustained examination. The Courts of Blood convened more and more frequently in response to charges of this sort of conspiracy, and the ranks of the clan’s elders thinned visibly. The Antediluvian itself didn’t seem to notice or care, and never answered questions about what its progeny should do.

Gradually, the memories the Assamites implanted into selected anarchs more selectively incriminated the elders Gratiano saw as a threat. Above all, he wanted to remove Montano, but he also worried about lesser figures of the court. To his dismay, the targets he most wanted removed proved most resistant to charges based on mental forgery. Gratiano himself assisted the Assamites in mind stirring, and as he says now, never before or since did he ever dominate mortals so thoroughly.

The pressures of his plan and the general situation must have inspired him to great heights, not to be ascended again until some future crisis makes it necessary.

With the clan in chaos, the killing blow fell one evening in the summer of 1483. Well, perhaps not. Accounts differ as to the actual date; this is what I recall.

A mixed-clan force of anarchs assaulted the Sicilian stronghold. The Antediluvian did not wake or rise, and mutual distrust hobbled Lasombra defenses. In short order, all the castle’s inhabitants other than the Antediluvian faced the command to surrender or perish. Montano evaded capture for the rest of the night, flitting about with Obtenebration arts not known to anyone else (except, presumably, the Antediluvian). In the end, Montano escaped. Everyone else surrendered to Gratiano’s force or became the invaders’ food.

Gratiano and a handful of elders descended into the depths to face the Antediluvian. The void-spirits common to the stronghold’s lower reaches were absent, so the descent was quick and easy. Half a dozen raiders fell upon the sleeping thing and drained it in minutes.

It never awoke or stirred. When the draining finished, it simply crumbled into a fine black ash with tarry residue.

There was, at the last moment, no great drama about it, merely the completion of a well-executed plan.

The Clan Without Its Head Gratiano convened the Friends of the Night, the Amici Noctis as they were then, and presented them with the deed already done. They could condemn him.

Indeed, he dared them to do so, taunting them that if they did not stop him now, he would remake the clan into something altogether new. The Friends listened and stepped aside. Some Friends chose to join with Gratiano’s revolt. Others kept quiet and let events unfold.

The great rebel announced that unlike Augustus Giovanni, he would not claim the status of clan founder.

He was, he said, quite content being a member of Clan Lasombra, now that the monster which once defined the clan was gone. Now every member of the clan could decide for himself what the lineage meant and act accordingly. No single will would thereafter run the clan: Gratiano explicitly rejected the role and “suggested” that the Friends of the Night not anoint a successor.

Montano frantically campaigned against this step, but to no avail. He and a handful of his supporters became a roving clan-in-exile and were dubbed by some unknown wit among the Friends as an “anti-tribe.”

Hatching the Sabbat Just one decade after Gratiano struck the decisive blow against our clan as it was, the Anarch Revolt came to a formal end in the pathetic declaration known as the Convention of Thorns. In short, the vast majority of anarchs meekly submitted to their elders once more in exchange for symbolic declarations of allegiance on the part of their once and future masters. Only a courageous handful in each clan chose to continue the fight.

Our term, the “anti-tribe,” became a badge of honor; eventually the form antitribu found widest acceptance.

You must remember that organization of any sort beyond the scope of a single clan was very new. The Camarilla was an actual innovation, something our kind produces only slowly. Elders turned to it not so much out of enthusiasm as out of the dread sense of its necessity.

Caught between mortal pressures and challenges from neonates, they voluntarily gave up a significant portion of the autonomy which used to define their status. The clans that stayed out of the Camarilla did so primarily because their elders were wise enough to see that the imperatives of the new organization would destroy old ways just as effectively as capitulation to the anarchs would have.

For the next half-century, our clan simply pursued its own course. So did the Tzimisce, who copied our destruction of the Antediluvian, for similar reasons, the Assamites (who cravenly capitulated to the Camarilla’s imposed curse), Giovanni, Ravnos and Setites remained at liberty. Our elders largely continued as they had done for some time, since the Courts of Blood continued to function. Our neonates experimented with new relations with humanity.

I remember very clearly the first occasion on which I heard the term “Sabbat” applied to a pack of Cainite preying on mortals. It was on Maundy Thursday in 1502, just after the midnight service. I remember this because I’d gone to Mass with certain clanmates in Naples. There was concern in the region about what some Friends called the Cainite Heresy. (I will not pause here to discuss the matter. Ask your pack leader, or your archbishop.) After the midnight service, a small group of us stood in the courtyard, admiring the stars and casually discussing the whole question of what role we played in God’s order.

I was so earnest then, and so foolish.

One of the youngest neonates spoke up to say that the whole area of Italy was blighted with peasant superstition (as it still is), including the notion that covens of witches roam the countryside in “sabbats,” dragging off adults and children alike for hideous rituals.

He and his associates, he claimed, dressed themselves in various styles traditionally ascribed to witches and acted as they were expected to: They ran with superhuman speed into a village, shouted out that they had come to collect the souls due their lord Satan, break down doors at random and seize enough people to feed themselves. We all found the notion highly amusing and commended his ingenuity.

I remembered that clever fellow again perhaps six or seven years later, when reports came to us of Cainite packs doing the same thing in the Danube Valley and along the Baltic coast. The presence of these Sabbat Cainites was, for many mortals, a precursor of the Ottoman siege at Vienna.

Freed in Blood Not long after the Ottoman tide peaked and turned back, we began to hear in Sicily of this new thing, the Vaulderie. You, of course, take it for granted. You cannot easily imagine what a startling thing it was. Bishop Emory never subjected any of you to a blood bond, did he? No, I thought not. It used to be that your sire or another elder could bind you to himself by making you drink his blood, and you would feel compelled to obey his whim, and love it. It was the recurring threat against disobedient childer.

Suddenly, thanks to some anonymous blood magician, we were free of the threat. We could form bonds to our like-minded peers, the Cainites to whom we chose to commit ourselves, and leave the elders none the wiser. I myself was one of the first to drink from the Vaulderie cup in the grand rituals we held above the ashes of our Antediluvian, and I helped remove my sire not long thereafter. It was a sweet, sweet thing.

Whenever you chafe under the bond that the Vaulderie creates, remember the alternative, and know that the old horror is always waiting to creep back if we cease our vigilant guard.

Whoever invented the Vaulderie, it spread like wildfire in the middle of the 16th century. Quite soon, particularly as Cainites measure such things, it was the defining practice of Cainites rebelling against the Camarilla and the sect’s masters, just as the Sabbat pack was already the defining organizational unit.

The combination of the two created a sense of unity among the dissenters. Sometime around the middle of the century, we began referring to ourselves as the Sabbat. The Courts of Blood first used the term in charges brought in 1552, and again in 1558, and then regularly after that. Remember, of course, that at this point we Lasombra mostly associated with each other; cross-clan packs were still rare as far as we were concerned. We regarded them suspiciously, even with the Vinculum bond at work.

Nonetheless, we took part in efforts to harass and undermine the Camarilla. You’ll find quite a good description of me in one of Charles Fort’s books, where he records (with his usual exuberant skepticism) an attack by Cainites on Maltese pilgrims in 1585. Even this scar is there in his text. We created such a public disturbance that the Antediluvian-lickers spent literally years trying to smooth things over again, and of course in the end it didn’t altogether work. Such successes came too rarely, perhaps, but we certainly forced them to commit more resources to the response than they would have liked.

Our rising glory established us as genuine rivals to the sect and attracted a small but steady flow of defectors who wished to be what the sect would never allow: Cainites exercising themselves to the fullest.

Building Paths Human philosophy took fresh twists in those centuries. So did ours. But first I must lay the context for you, as it was a time very different from this.

Most Cainites throughout history have always kept to a moral standard more or less like that of the human society in which they originated. They reject some tenets, of course, but keep to others. They are more likely to think of themselves as wicked people than as good beings by standards that have nothing to do with humanity. Around this contemptible fascination for the ways of the living, tradition placed a number of “Roads,” more or less formalized ethical systems reflecting vampiric experience. Most of them took some particular interest — chivalry, or insight into mortality, or what have you — and magnified it into a whole… I believe “paradigm” is the modern word.

In the late Middle Ages, the weaklings in the newly created Camarilla went on a crusade against the Roads.

Yes, faced with rising challenges from humanity and given the opportunity to join the anarchs and Sabbatto-be in turning on elder tyrants, they chose to purge Cainites who refused to pretend to be kine. I’m sure this impresses you just as it did me when I first learned of it. Yes, the Camarilla in its collective wisdom decided that the real problem was with those Cainites who chose not to exist in ways conducive to hiding among humanity. Many of the Roads disappeared altogether, and the rest vanished from general view. Afterward, their practitioners kept their secrets hidden.

All of this created an intellectual void among Cainites. Under the aegis of the Sabbat, a great intellectual fervor roiled throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Nearly a dozen new ethical systems came into existence and received the ruthless acid test of practice in the hands and minds of Cainites very keen to shed more humanity without losing themselves to the Beast. Collectively known as the Paths of Enlightenment, these systems are among the great lasting achievements of our sect. It goes nearly without saying, I hope, that Clan Lasombra played a vital role in this development. We wisely refrained from annihilating our own distinctive Road of Night, and thus began with a better foundation for Path development than
any other clan. The Amies Noir provided extensive support for the philosophers and sages interested in codifying other approaches, as well.

There’s a curious feature of this work. Most of the key inventors chose to remain anonymous. We simply don’t have reliable names or necrographies (if I may coin a term) for the Cainites who, for instance, formalized old dualist notions into the Path of the Cathari or worked out the elegant compromise that is the Path of Honorable Accord. You can learn much about early adherents to each of these, and it’s a plausible guess that those speaking and writing early on about a given Path are the ones who created it, but that cannot be more than a guess. Perhaps there’s something in the act of creating a system intended to be universal that conflicts with the normal egoism of Cainites. Or perhaps, as some Lasombra tell it, the fact that the creators chose to remain in the shadows is a literal fact as well as a metaphor, and indicates the creative power of the Abyss at work within them.

Into the New World I do not reveal a great secret when I say that despite our best efforts, we did not succeed in displacing the Camarilla from Europe. This shouldn’t be any great surprise, of course. Of the clans outside the Camarilla, only we and the Giovanni had significant presence in Western Europe. The others were all, in their respective ways, marginal, attached to other lands. We had fervor on our side — holy fervor, I like to think, an echo of the passion that drove Caine — but we lacked the resources.

Inevitably, then, we examined alternatives. The Camarilla knew about the discoveries across the Atlantic just as we did, of course. They simply didn’t care, except for a passing interest in Aztec and Incan cities.

We didn’t have the luxury of passing interest — we had to find new realms for ourselves. So it was that, individually and then collectively, we sailed with our clan’s own corsairs (and unwitting mortals) to carve out empires from the lands of the savages.

I see a question in your faces. Yes, I said “savages.”

I don’t care what social feats they achieved before Europeans came. A people who do not build great cities are not a people worth feeding from, let alone worthy candidates for the Embrace. The European notion that the city defines civilization is at least in part a tribute to our influence, and it is one of the great truths of our kind, Gangrel and other rabble notwithstanding. We backed settlement ventures everywhere in the New World to create proper homes for ourselves.

Those were nights of chaos, or so those who made the trip early on tell me. Cut off from their various clans’ procedures for governance, the emigrants constantly squabbled among themselves. Efforts to organize continent-spanning Vaulderie gatherings came to nothing, so the only reliable bonds of unity were local. In addition, the emigrants encountered a level of Lupine activity unprecedented in our experience since the Stone Age.

Nor did we get the continent to ourselves: Camarilla rabble (and some infiltrators disguised as rabble) made their way across the sea as well, bringing with them the stifling protocols they worship as “Traditions.”

It goes without saying that in the middle of this struggle, we distinguished ourselves as leaders. The somewhat decentralized nature of the Friends of the Night means that our clan’s members are never wholly cut off so long as an experienced clanmates is nearby.

The Courts of Blood became, for several decades, the closest thing to procedural justice in the New World, and on some occasions the Friends even contracted out their services to Camarilla Cainites needing disputes settled. Just see if any of the participants who still remain active ever discuss that, though.

The subject of parallels between our practices and various traditions the savages practiced warrant discussion, but on some other occasion. Suffice it to say for now that just as we’d incorporated disparate European traditions to suit our emerging body of ritae, so we drew on these unfamiliar customs as well. Unfortunately, while we engaged in this syncretism, the main force of the Camarilla itself arrived in the late 17th century; by 1700, significant enclaves arose in most port cities and some interior settlements. Our hit-and-run tactics fared better on the frontier, so we concentrated there, leaving behind too many choice morsels.

We did better in Central and South America.

Mexico, of course, has been ours almost since Cortez.

We were there as the old city of Tenochtitlan became Mexico City, with literally miles of warrens perfect for our gatherings. We were slower to follow Pizarro and his ilk, but that’s the fault of the Amazon and the The Blood Masters Fade Several holes in Lasombra history suggest the use of high-powered mental Disciplines. One of these is the activities of the thaumaturgists who inspired the Lasombra to support genocide in the New World.

After about 1550, they just don’t show up anymore in the records. Nobody asks about them. Perhaps they were destroyed or perished voluntarily. Perhaps not.

They might just as easily be out there in the deserts and mountains, pursuing whatever ends brought them across the Atlantic millennia ago.

fanatically Cainite-hating creatures who dwell there.

It took time to work out safe routes to new Sabbat strongholds in the mountains and southern shores.

I don’t wish to give you the impression that we did nothing in the Englishand French-speaking colonies, merely that it was harder to make progress. For some reason the Camarilla “Kindred” from northern nations did a better job at opportunistic aggression than their southern cousins. We faced the sharpest competition along the northern Atlantic seaboard and down the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Your instructors have, I’m sure, pointed out that as a clan we seldom attempt to drive human affairs, simply to profit from them as suits our own interests.

The matter of the conquistadors and the Aztecs is an interesting exception. Two Lasombra scholars accompanied the second expedition to Mexico, and they listened with great interest to Aztec priests’ accounts of how the sacrifices to Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun, insured that the sun would rise every day. These were nights of sometimes mad ambition among our clan, and a pair of Spanish packs decided that they just might be able to plunge the world into eternal darkness by eliminating the Aztecs.

This wasn’t quite as ludicrous a notion as you might think. Early Sabbat travelers in the New World encountered ancient thaumaturgists lurking in the wilds, practicing paths unknown in the Old World. Some of them seemed to be very old indeed, Methuselahs, perhaps even Antediluvians whose names were lost to history.

It frankly didn’t seem entirely out of the question that they might have powerful magic affecting the sun, or at least the passage of light to Earth.

We did not make the great genocide. For that matter, neither did the Europeans, directly, at least. Disease did most of the work long before armies arrived. We did as a clan provide funds for missions of conquest, and we used our influence to support the dream of conquest at moments when bad news might have weakened mortal commitment to the cause. All of this amounted to helping mortals do what they already decided to do, but we made them more effective than they’d have been otherwise.

As you know, the sun did not go out when sacrifices to Huitzilopochtli faltered and stopped. Pity.

Peace and Flight The century of mortal revolution was also a century of war within the Sabbat. No American or French revolution could be any more incestuous and altogether wretched than the conflicts for scarce herds that swept through our sect. For a tense decade around 1800, it looked like the Sabbat — at least in the Americas
— might not survive as a united entity. Obviously, from your presence here, we did survive, and we owe much of that to a deal struck in 1803. The so-called “Purchase Pact” proclaimed an end to old grievances and granted a right of destruction against individuals acting in ways that threatened the sect’s interests. This latter gave more power to the ecclesiastical hierarchy that was forming at the time. (Standardized titles and ranks didn’t appear until later in the 19th century.) The Purchase Pact didn’t end all strife within the sect, nor did anyone expect it would. It reduced the level of existing tension and made it easier to respond quickly to future conflicts. That was remarkable, under the circumstances.

The peace, such as it was, took time to spread south of Englishor French-speaking lands. It never fully took hold in the new nations carved out of northeastern South America. Simon Bolivar and his revolution changed the mix of forces at work. The Camarilla stayed further away from the ongoing mess, while our kind reveled in it. Even now, you simply don’t find many of the Antediluvian’s servants in Colombia, Uruguay or Venezuela. In an environment with fewer external pressures, our internal differences ranged more freely, and something like warfare has always existed among the local archbishops and cardinals. Which reminds me… Cainites in Miters Some of you, I’m sure, have wondered how it is that a gathering of Cainites dedicated to the free expression of our innermost selves comes to resemble human institutions dedicated to doctrinal conformity. Two distinct but constantly interacting forces make it so.

First, there’s parody, or rather satire. We use the forms of mortal religion, primarily but not exclusively Roman Catholicism, because it amuses us to do so.

Cainites get bored, and a bunch of bored Cainites in one place is an invitation to trouble. Since we need some structure to our routine affairs, why not make it one with intricate details and much potential for administrative complications? Our institution, like our rites, is in part a game.

Second — yes, we glorify the power of the individual Cainite. But to fully understand what that power is, we must seek the truth and eschew error. We deceive others.

We must not deceive ourselves. The truth we probe is ultimately religious. Whether you subscribe to the modern fad for treating Cainites in anthropological terms or possess the courage to acknowledge that our existence points directly at God, spirit, soul and other facts the modern world flees, you must see that the questions we pose are religious ones. We deal with the nature of the world, of sin and damnation and redemption, of curses and death. These are real things, not the product of our imagined hopes or fears. There are active powers in the night and beyond the stars, and those who approach them unprepared perish.

The ecclesiastical hierarchy, at least when administered the way we run the Sabbat, brings prepared individuals to the top. The structure serves to remind us all that distinctions exist between us, and that some are in fact better prepared for particular roles than others.

You give obedience to your superiors because they are superior in certain regards. You owe your survival to them for performing their assigned roles properly. You are not prepared to confront alone the enemies we face, let alone the deeper threats behind them. You serve precisely in order to develop yourself in freedom. Total freedom would be mere annihilation — you surrender what you must to gain what you can.

Other veterans of the Sabbat would cite at least two more points. Neither of them impresses me much, but you may as well hear them as not.

Some members of our sect believe that this or that human religion actually speaks truth. The late Cardinal Monçada was our most prominent exponent of that notion with regard to Roman Catholicism. The peculiar Abyss cult among the antitribu holds the same notion with regard to Zoroastrian and other dualistic religions.

They would tell you that we use mortal religious structures when those structures are true. Give this notion whatever respect you feel it deserves.

And finally, some of our most prominent elders argue for the use of mortal religious structures for purely psychological reasons. When the Sabbat came into being, Roman Catholicism was the official religion in the lands we were strongest in. Protestant Christianity prevailed elsewhere, but has frankly never generated a very strong set of symbols, so we can make little use of it. Even in Protestant lands, Catholic (or Eastern Orthodox) imagery conveys a sense of sacred authority. In Hindu lands, our cathedrals hold shrines to all the gods of death, chaos and terror. In the Americas, we erect totem poles to dark forces and gather in sweat lodges as well as temples. Wherever we go, whatever speaks of the sacred becomes a tool for us to evoke a state of mind in you, while you learn to grasp the truths to which the symbols point.

It grows late. The rest is for someone else to tell you.