# Hatching the Sabbat
Hatching the Sabbat
The 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.
Clanbook: Lasombra 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.
Chapter One: An Unmirrored Corridor 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