The childer of Haqim, known as Assamites to the rest of the Kindred, are a silent knife in the dark, an order of bloodthirsty assassins who participate in the secret wars of the undead by operating as killers for hire. Outside the purview of the sects, the Assamites are true independents and mercenaries, hiring out to whoever can pay their blood-price and ungoverned by the will of Prince or Priscus. By the time a mark realizes that they’re being hunted by an Assamite, it’s often far too late. Needless to say, this makes the Assamites both feared and reviled by many of the other clans.

In truth, the Assamites are more than simple thugs and killers. Theirs is a complex but insular clan predicated upon the three principles of wisdom, sorcery, and diablerie. Most Assamites that other vampires encounter are members of the warrior caste, however, so Kindred society has painted them all with that brush. For their part, the Assamites have done nothing to stop this misunderstanding. If it helps them acquire contracts and it occludes the true nature of their clan, the better for them.

Long ago, the Assamites were brought to heel by a powerful curse to curb their bloodlust, levied by the Tremere at the behest of the Camarilla. They cannot taste the vitae of vampires without it causing them harm. In their ongoing quest to lower their Generation and bring themselves closer to their holy figure, Haqim (whom some outside scholars claim was of the Second Generation, while others insist he was a judge appointed by the other Antediluvians), the Assamites must refine the blood of Kindred into an alchemical solution. Were it not for this mystical yoke, the Assamites would surely be unchecked on a crusade of unholy diablerie.

A History of the Children of Haqim

As I look towards an uncertain future, I find myself forced to consider and reconsider the past. There is much of our Clan’s history for which I am one of the few extant witnesses, but far more precedes even my venerable age. Perhaps if we Viziers had done more to educate the Children of our history and legacy... but no, events happened as they did and could not have happened any other way. What matters is where we are today and what decisions we make next. Still, history can still serve as our guide, and so I set my own history to paper for the benefit of my fellow Assamites.

As I have said, I am a Vizier, and so my biases should be obvious to any astute reader. For the record, my sire and grandsire were... reticent about sharing the details of their own unlives, and there are few older than them who would speak at all about our collective past. Accordingly, much of what I know of our origins is hearsay and conjecture, likely with a healthy dose of deliberate misrepresentation. As a childe, I was naive. It would be many centuries before I would countenance the possibility that my kin might lie about our history.

The First Nights

There are two wildly contradictory tales surrounding Haqim’s own Embrace and early unlife. The version that I believe to be closest to the truth is as follows, though I acknowledge the alternative origin, well-established amongst the extremist wing of the Warrior caste before I joined the Children. Though I find it unpersuasive, it is not impossible that their version is correct.

In my preferred history, Haqim was a warrior and military leader during the age of the First City who received the Embrace from a member of the Second Generation. There is little textual evidence as to which one. Although his background was as a warrior and hunter, he devoted his early unlife to intellectual pursuits, making him learned for the time. It appears that he did not Embrace childer of his own until the rise of the Second City. His first childer were men and women of learning, and they laid the foundations of the Vizier caste. As the eldest caste, we should have held dominion over the rest of our Clan to this very night. That we failed has been our gravest error.

In time (and supposedly in response to pressure from his fellow Antediluvians), Haqim created a second bloodline, the Warrior caste. Ask a Warrior, and he will tell you that Haqim created their caste to serve as judges of the conduct of the other Cainites of the Second City. Rubbish. None of the other Clans would have ever tolerated a single Clan having the power of judgment over them, let alone asking for it, as some legends say. The Warriors were to serve as elite troops to fight in military campaigns against the enemies of the Second City, primarily the thrice-damned Baali. When the Warriors proved no match for the demonically empowered Baali, Haqim created a third bloodline, the Sorcerers. Of the Sorcerers, the most powerful (and most frightening) was the mysterious Ur-Shulgi, whose form was that of a horrific child whose skin had blackened as if burned. It took the combined prowess of all three castes, and especially the terrifying might of Ur-Shulgi, to finally end the Baali menace, at least for a time. My grandsire described an encounter with Ur-Shulgi once. I think it was the only time I ever saw him show fear.

From the beginning, there was friction between our castes, bound together by shared blood, but little else. Over time, the greatest issue would be population growth. For selection as a Vizier, a prospect needed to demonstrate intelligence, political acumen, and some degree of education. In the Bronze Age, such qualities were rare. To be a Sorcerer, the prospect needed to demonstrate the even rarer qualities of some degree of functional occult knowledge and, ideally, be able to work some form of magic as a mortal. Selection as a Warrior... required only the ability to kill. Admittedly, the Warriors only selected those who were the absolute best at it, but even the most accomplished fighters, soldiers, and assassins were far easier to find than suitable candidates were for Embrace as a Vizier or a Sorcerer. Is it any wonder that by the time our Clan relocated to Alamut, the Warriors made up over half our numbers?

The Eagle’s Nest

In the fullness of time, the Second City fell, its rulers cursed by Caine himself. Our history is unclear on whether Haqim and his Clan were present at the time. Some of our legends say that he had already relocated to Alamut by then, sickened as he was by the corruption of the other Antediluvians. Other less politically correct anecdotes say that Caine cursed us as well, that the peculiarities of the Viziers and the Sorcerers stem from the displeasure of Haqim’s grand-sire, and the Warriors also suffered punishment with a blood-borne curse at that time. There are few records of those nights, and no Children who observed them first hand are around to tell the tale. Exactly why there are no written records of the First Nights is a matter of some debate, given the existence of an entire caste deeply concerned with record keeping. The consensus is that records dating back to that time were lost during the transition to Alamut, or else deliberately destroyed when the Web of Knives came into prominence. However, there are persistent legends of a “secret library” that the elder Viziers hid away from their enemies within the Clan. As for the Curse, if Caine did levy one against us, he would not be the last to do so, and his curse was not as debilitating as those that would come later.

Whatever the circumstances, Haqim eventually led the Children to a new communal haven — Alamut, the Eagle’s Nest. I will not commit its location to writing. Indeed, I could not even if I wished, for that location remains occluded by the will of an Antediluvian who had mastered the ultimate expressions of Disciplines dedicated to stealth and silence. Haqim’s power shielded Alamut from discovery for millennia, and Alamut became the heart of the Assamite Clan. Typically, no more than a few dozen of the Children permanently resided in its labyrinthine tunnels at a time, although they share space with enough ghouls and mortals to serve and feed the Kindred inhabitants. All loyal members of the Clan from the moment of our Embrace instinctively know the way home, just as the will of our Ancestor binds us all against revealing that home to outsiders in the face of the cruelest of tortures or the most seductive magic. Betrayers of the Clan give themselves away by the fact that they lose all memory of Alamut’s location. Only once did an outsider penetrate the veil which protects Alamut, and that was enough to change the course of our history.

While the elders of our Clan made Alamut the center of our power, the rest of the Children spread out across Asia and North Africa, in some places coexisting with other Kindred and in others dominating the region. Unfortunately, our founder Haqim took an exceedingly dim view of our entanglement with the Jyhad. While seemingly loathe to outright forbid Assamites from involving themselves in Kindred politics, he communicated his unhappiness in increasingly obvious ways until, finally, he exploded after a fight broke out within Alamut itself between Children on opposite sides of the Peloponnesian War. Denouncing all sides for putting political machinations above Clan unity, Haqim left Alamut that night. He returned on a few occasions but only briefly, and he offered no input into the Clan’s affairs when he did.

The Rise of the Warriors

When Haqim abandoned Alamut, it provoked the most extremist and elitist of the Warriors into an impulsive action. Or perhaps, it merely gave them the opportunity they had been waiting for. Opinions differ. Since the days of the Second City, Haqim had made a practice of leaving his childer to their own devices for decades at a time, and in his absence, a policy arose whereby the leaders of the three castes would choose an “Eldest” vampire to direct the Clan’s affairs in Haqim’s absence. With superior numbers and fighting skills, the extremist Warriors staged a bloodless coup and established that henceforth, the Clan would always choose their Eldest from the Warrior caste, using claims that it had been the Viziers who were solely responsible for alienating the Clan’s founder.

Incensed but lacking the resources to fight back, the Viziers and the Sorcerers acquiesced, and for the next two millennia, the Warriors would be the face of the Assamite Clan. To be fair, the Warrior caste itself split evenly on the matter, with many of those outside the coup leaders indignant on our behalf. Ultimately, though, they chose to support their caste rather than allow the whole Clan to fall into civil war. Those dissidents were instrumental in protecting the Viziers and Sorcerers against hardliners who openly talked of our extermination.

Not all accepted the new status quo, though. There had always been Assamites who chose independence over Clan loyalty and had elected to make their own way: The Dispossessed. After the Warriors seized control, the numbers of Dispossessed swelled with Viziers, Sorcerers, and even many of the less doctrinaire Warriors who felt unsafe within their own caste. All fled Alamut to pursue their fortunes elsewhere. During this era, two additional bloodlines were born: the Shango, Assamite Sorcerers who turned their back on the Quietus Discipline and became a part of the African Laibon community, and the so-called Bedouins, warrior nomads who wandered North Africa with little concerns for the plans of the leaders of Alamut. Those plans were ambitious indeed.

As the extremists consolidated their hold on the rest of the Clan, they followed the same course as other conquerors by rewriting our past in order to exalt themselves over their kin. In the newly approved history, the purpose of the Assamites was to judge and punish all other Cainites for their sins, real or imagined. In time, they even developed a new origin for Haqim himself. No longer had one of Caine’s childer selected him for the Embrace. Instead, he was a hero who fought against the evil Caine, murdering the nameless king and queen who had been Caine’s first childer and stealing their blood to make himself a vampire of the Second Generation instead of the Third. Afterwards, he led his followers directly to Alamut where he commanded the warriors to scourge the world of Caine’s other offspring. A fanciful tale, to be sure, particularly when one considered the dearth of any evidence that Haqim had sired any Third Generation offspring of his own.

Less fanciful and more troubling was the new philosophy that accompanied the new and improved history: the Path of Blood. In its earlier iteration, the Road of Blood was a noble philosophy that asked its adherents to act honorably, to punish the wicked, protect the innocent, and resist passion in favor of reason. Over the ensuing centuries, the extremists twisted it into a ruthless and violent approach to unlife that commanded its followers to not only kill without moral hesitation, but to commit diablerie at every opportunity. We Viziers were horrified at these developments, but lacked the power to curb our brethren’s new ideas. Soon though, we would find a new philosophy of our own, while the Warriors would reap the consequences of their own bloodlust.

The Prophet, the Devil, and the Web

The seventh century C.E. saw two seismic changes among the Children: the birth and growth of Islam and the Baali Curse. Outsiders often fail to understand how these two events altered our Clan. Indeed, most outsiders don’t even know that the Baali Curse happened, and incorrectly assume that the Assamites, regardless of caste affinity, have always had an insatiable lust for Kindred blood.

Many modern Children think that Islam inspired some sort of mass conversion among the Assamites and that, from the start, we were the vampiric wing of the Islamic movement. On the contrary, the extremist leaders of the emergent cult of Haqim loathe Islam because the principles of humility, mercy, and compassion found within the Qur’an are incompatible with their vision. Allah was not, after all, a proponent of genocide, while those extremists seek nothing else but the annihilation of all other Cainites.

It was for those reasons that those of us who stood outside the extremist cult quietly undermined all efforts to influence the growth of Islam into a form more to their liking. In time, our efforts bore fruit. By the ninth century C.E., it was increasingly difficult to find potential recruits for our Clan in the lands where we traditionally roamed who were not faithful to Allah in life. It was just as difficult to persuade newly Embraced childer who had been faithful all their lives to abandon that faith in favor of blind devotion to a genocidal blood-god, particularly when two of the three castes insisted that said blood-god was not at all as he’d been portrayed by his more energetic worshipers. Although the majority of the Assamites were never Muslim, Muslim Assamites did come to represent a plurality of the Clan. Moreover, with the Viziers, the Sorcerers, and more than a few Warriors united in preserving the Islamic Assamites’ right to worship Allah as they saw fit, Islam served as a vital bulwark against the Cult of Haqim.

Such a bulwark was needed, for the birth of the Prophet was not the only major event of that era to impact our Clan. In 636 C.E., the Baali once more stretched forth their tainted hands in the Middle East. It would be the last time those dogs would dare to act so openly, but our victory was pyrrhic. Even as our warriors and sorcerers brought down the walls of the infamous hell-city of Chorazin, the Baali smote their attackers with a terrible infernal curse. The Warriors were the first and most heavily affected. I like to think that the reliance of the Viziers and Sorcerers upon reason and rationality was what protected us, and I cannot help but note that the extremist Warriors fell to the curse more easily than those who eschewed emotionalism. Regardless, within a century, most of the warriors and a sizable percentage of the other castes suffered, contaminated with a terrible lust for Cainite blood. In time, the other Clans would come to think of us as nothing but a depraved Clan who had always thirsted for their blood.

Undaunted by these changes, the extremists fought back with an indoctrination campaign intended to fill the Clan with new recruits who were free of the “weakness” imposed by Islam. They were ready to embrace the hunger imposed by the Baali Curse as just an obstacle on the path to godhood. Finally, the extremists had a name for their movement: the Web of Knives, yet another thing we would have stamped out in its infancy had we the means to have done so. Created as a way of “building the perfect warriors for Haqim,” the Web of Knives eventually became the dominant political faction within our Clan and, in many ways, the face the Assamites would present to the other Kindred for centuries to come.

The Middle Ages, and the Tremere Curse

It was against this backdrop that the Crusades came to the Middle East. Despite our differences, the Children united against the intruders. The Islamic Assamites, along with the much smaller cadre of Jewish Assamites, wished to protect the Holy Lands of their religions against Christian domination. The Viziers and Sorcerers wished to defend the territories that were our political domains from theft by potential enemies. The Christian Assamites (and there were indeed some) elected to defer to the will of a majority that gravely outnumbered them and was suspicious of their loyalty. The Web of Knives, for the most part, reveled fattening themselves on the vitae of European Cainites. Once more, the Children fully immersed themselves in the Jyhad to the point that we would one day direct the heirs of the Prophet to sack fabled Constantinople itself. How Haqim must have wept if he could see it.

Nor was the Jyhad limited to the Holy Lands. Warriors in and out of the Web of Knives used atrocities committed by crusaders as pretext for their own forays into Europe, aided by the social upheaval accompanying the Anarch Revolt. Entire cities were denuded of their Cainite populations, elder and Anarch alike, consumed by our assassins. Our conflicts with the other Clans continued into the fifteenth century C.E., when the newly born Camarilla decided to flex its muscles and declare a Blood Hunt against all Assamites wherever they might find us. Even we Viziers laughed at this, until the Nosferatu spy was captured in the very heart of Alamut. The discovery sent a shockwave through the Children. Since time immemorial, Alamut was sacrosanct. After bitter arguments (some violent), the Old Man in the Mountain made his decree: protect Alamut. We had to obtain peace with the Camarilla.

The leaders of the Web of Knives were furious, even more so when neither the Du’at nor the Old Man would reveal precisely why it was so important to preserve the sanctity of Alamut, which, despite its role in unifying our Clan, was really just the most prominent of many secret Assamite lairs. The truth is a secret held only by those four: Alamut holds a significant quantity of the Heartblood, Haqim’s own blood, within a well deep within the Mountain. Al-Ashrad believed that if the Tremere gained access to Heartblood, they might be able to target Haqim himself with a killing curse through his sympathetic link with the Mountain. Through him, they could enslave or even slay the entirety of the Clan wherever we might hide.

Therefore, it was that our representatives bound the entire Clan to the Treaty of Tyre, thereby providing the Tremere with a sympathetic link that let them target us with a less destructive punishment. In the space of a single night, the Tremere cursed every Assamite to suffer pain and to risk Final Death upon the consumption of Kindred vitae. The Web of Knives raged. No longer could they pursue “Haqim’s command” that they devour their way to apotheosis through the sacrament of diablerie. For those who did not pursue the Path of Blood, the results of the Tremere Curse were more... ambiguous. It effectively neutralized the much more debilitating Baali Curse, and largely defanged those adherents of the Path of Blood who were openly genocidal in their aims. However, those positive benefits were outweighed by the humiliation of our defeat at the hands of the Camarilla.

On the other hand, not all of the Children were victims of the Tremere Curse. Al-Ashrad counseled that undoing the curse would be the work of centuries, but some of the Children, mainly the eldest leaders of the Web of Knives, were impatient. They journeyed in secret to the forgotten ruins of Chorazin and did... something. Al-Ashrad has advised me that I should not ask about the matter, and while I find that condescending, I also find the way he counseled me to be unnerving enough to acquiesce. Few things in this world frighten the Amr. Suffice it to say that a sizable contingent of Warriors freed themselves from the Tremere Curse, apparently killing the handful of Viziers and Sorcerers who accompanied them in the process. In doing so, they judged themselves superior to the rest of the Children and washed their hands of us, opting instead to join the nascent Sabbat as the Assamite antitribu. I am told that the most potent of them rule the Sabbat to this night from the shadows as lords of the so-called Black Hand.

The majority of the Warriors remained among the Children. Lacking the ability to freely pursue the vitae of other Cainites, they petitioned the Amr for some way to do so indirectly, and, with some reluctance, he complied. The result was a form of simple ritual magic within the ability of any competent Assamite that allows one to “tithe” a quantity of vitae to a Sorcerer who then processes it into a form that a Warrior can safely consume. Enough vitae converted in this manner allows a devotee of the Path of Blood to eventually bring himself closer to Haqim in a manner similar to diablerie, but without the soul-damaging side effects. Therefore, it came to pass that the mighty warriors of Haqim, the scourge of all Cainites, became common hit men willing to murder any target in exchange for a dribble of their employer’s blood.

A Humbled Clan

The most disruptive elements of the Web of Knives were gone altogether, having abandoned the Clan to become antitribu. In this manner, the Children achieved a certain degree of equilibrium that had been lacking for centuries. Constantinople fell, but other predominantly Muslim governments, empires, and caliphates rose in its place. The Viziers shaped them as best they could, mainly with the goal of preventing the European vampires from encroaching into our domains. The Sorcerers withdrew their researches into the deeper mysteries of Dur-An-Ki, our Clan’s answer to Thaumaturgy, making enough token efforts towards breaking the Tremere Curse to satisfy the Warriors.

Paranoid Cainites frequently accuse the Assamites of having masterminded the events known to the West as “9/11.” Typical Western bigotry. We were as surprised as anyone else was, mortal or Cainite, by that atrocity. The attack would have offended us just for its cowardly execution, but 9/11 also led to rampant Islamophobia among Westerners unprecedented since the Crusades, to say nothing of the violence it unleashed across the Middle East.

Within months of the attack, America and its allies were dropping bombs. By seeming coincidence, a few of the American bombing campaigns struck our holdings in the affected areas with unusual accuracy. The first clue we had that it was more than mere coincidence came when American forces in Baghdad, due to an apparent communications error, failed to secure the National Museum. As a result, a large number of antiquities were looted, some of which (unbeknownst to the kine) dated back to the time of the Second City. While the theft was an embarrassment to the American government, it would be worse if they knew the truth. Our agents who had infiltrated the Americans brought back the bodies of the last few guards to remain at the museum before the looting. They had been burned beyond recognition — not by any conventional incendiary, but by a supernatural attack so obscure that our sorcerers cannot identify its origin.

Two months later, Al-Ashrad sent me a video recording of a prophecy made by a mortal seer who was a part of his retinue, one he had never dared to make either a ghoul or a Kindred lest the Blood interfere with the mortal’s remarkable insights. Her final prophecy was one so horrific that she died from its making. It predicts the rise of the Black Shepherd, one of the sobriquets used by the slumbering Methuselah Ur-Shulgi. It predicts a culling of our Clan. Combined with the mysterious enemy who has used the fog of war to infiltrate our domains, I must assume the worst. The Assamites must prepare as best we can, even if it means doing the unthinkable.

Tonight’s Assassin

What does it mean to be an Assamite? A difficult question, for no other Clan is as diverse as the Assamites, and we have never been as much in flux as we are right now. Three distinct bloodlines united under a common identity, plus more bloodlines on the outside looking in. An independent Clan with close ties to the Sabbat, but whose leaders are considering mass defection to the Camarilla for protection from a rising Methuselah who may not even exist. Two deeply felt and completely incompatible religious movements, plus a plethora of smaller religions chafing under their own lack of Clan influence. A dominant caste completely unsuited to lead the Clan in the modern era, but which does so anyway just because it outnumbers the other two combined. A universally recognized stereotype of “crazy Muslim assassin” that ignores alternative identities ranging from Reconquista-era Spaniards to Zionist Jews to American soldiers Embraced during the first Gulf War. A rich tradition of blood sorcery about which the Tremere know little, though the promise of sharing our knowledge with our old enemies may yet earn us a place at the Camarilla’s table. After millennia of evolution, who are the Assamites tonight?

Religion and the Assamites

Religion plays a greater role among the Children of Haqim than in any other Clan save, perhaps, the Followers of Set (I have not bothered to learn of their ways). Among the main Clan, the vast majority of our new recruits who joined within the last two centuries were Muslim at the time of their Embrace. A much smaller percentage was ethnically and religiously Jewish in life, and an even smaller cohort is comprised of a wide cross-section of religious views, ranging from Zoroastrianism and pre-Christian and pre-Islamic polytheism (among elders) to Catholicism, Protestant, and Evangelical Christianity.

While it is not unusual to cling to mortal beliefs for the first few years, most do not have a faith strong enough to survive undeath without breaking or bending. Among Assamites who have been among us long enough to reconsider their faith, barely a plurality still follows the precepts of Islam, though this does include many influential elders. The next largest religious affiliation effectively worships Haqim himself. More accurately, they worship the image of Haqim the Destroyer fashioned by the Web of Knives as a focus for their beliefs — an image at odds with Haqim as most of the elders who were his contemporaries remember him. A sizable number of sorcerers worship the ancient Mesopotamian pantheon, although “worship” is perhaps not the best term for a system of beliefs adopted solely to facilitate certain magical practices.

The remainder of the Clan is either agnostic, irreligious (including Children who consider themselves “damned” according to the religion they once followed), or else still attempt to follow whatever beliefs they held in life. Such beliefs include Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The latter two are especially common among those Assamites who dwell in India, along with a smaller number of Sikh Assamites. Likewise, many of the Shango bloodline in Central Africa still follow the Yorùbá religion of their ancestors.

Muslim Assamites typically follow the Five Pillars of Islam, albeit in a manner adapted to the vampiric condition. For example, they observe the custom of Salat, ritual prayer in the direction of Mecca, but the Assamite prays five times during the night instead of the day. Likewise, Assamites are generally unable to perform the Hajj (a pilgrimage to Mecca) unless they have permission and assistance from the mysterious vampires who have appointed themselves guardians of that holy city. For centuries, a mysterious supernatural effect known as the Keening bars most vampires from Mecca, but a ritual performed by the city’s custodians can alleviate it for specific vampires. As those custodians are selective about whom they allow into Mecca, most Muslim Assamites will instead make at least one pilgrimage to Alamut to pray to Allah in the presence of the Well of the Heartblood, a practice the Web of Knives grudgingly tolerates. Instead of fasting during Ramadan, the Assamite must reduce his blood intake to the minimum needed to avoid torpor and frenzy.

The Contract

Anyone who wishes to contract with the Assamites for assassinations must usually do so through the Silsila, though in cities where an Assamite openly resides, she will usually be willing to facilitate introductions for a fee. No Assamite loyal to the Clan will accept a contract that has not gone through the Silsila. Assassinations of mortal targets are usually paid in cash, although at exorbitant rates: a quarter million U.S. dollars per hit is cheap for an Assamite killer. If the target is supernatural or is under the protection of supernatural beings, the price goes up accordingly. If the client is a vampire, blood is always the price, which the client must bleed into a magically prepared clay vessel while the Assamite watches. The vessel is not a storage medium but a transference device. The blood immediately materializes in a companion vessel in the possession of a Sorcerer, who then prepares it for future use by the Clan.

The Silsila has a formula by which the relative difficulty of the kill is balanced against a particular quantity and quality of vitae to be paid. The assassin must tithe ten percent of all payments to his sire, and another ten percent to the Clan. The Vizier collects any money or other material payments for appropriate reinvestment. Occult artifacts go to the Amr, who compensates the assassin as appropriate. The Caliph receives any payment in vitae collected directly from vampire clients, adding the Clan’s share to the Well of Heartblood. Whatever vitae remains for the assassin is held by the Amr in a special urn for the benefit of the assassin until enough is accumulated to reduce their Generation through the Dur-An-Ki ritual called “From Marduk’s Throat.”

The Laws of Haqim

Most Assamites know of and at least attempt to follow the laws laid down by Haqim when he founded Alamut. The problems lie in differing interpretations and in disagreement on which laws are most important. For example, the Law of Destruction forbids Assamites from slaying “those of the Blood.” The Viziers, and to a lesser extent the Sorcerers, see this as a prescription against genocide, while most of the Warriors limit the meaning of “those of the Blood” to fellow Assamites. The most reactionary of the Web of Knives would go further and say that only Warriors are “of the Blood,” and the other castes exist at their sufferance.

The Law of Leadership

Honor the Eldest among you, for he is to rule my House when I am absent.

This law has been a basis of the Clan’s de facto gerontocracy since antiquity. Most elders are afforded respect by their juniors regardless of caste. The Web of Knives is the exception; its members generally scoff at the idea of acknowledging the Vizier and the Amr as being in any way equal to the Caliph and the Eldest. Warriors outside the Web of Knives are more respectful to the elders of the other two castes, but even they assume the primacy of the Caliph and the Eldest. For their part, Tegyrius and Al-Ashrad both recoil from the idea of submitting to an inhuman blood-god like Ur-Shulgi should he arise, no matter how old the Black Shepherd is.

The Law of Protection

Ward the mortals from Caine’s descendants and treat them with honor in all things.

Increasingly, those Assamites outside the Web of Knives feel moved to protect mortals from those of us who look upon humans as livestock rather than beings worthy of consideration.

The Law of the Destruction

Slay not those of the Blood, for that judgment is for the elder alone.

As noted, the Clan is divided on who is and is not of the Blood, with the Web of Knives openly espousing genocide against the other Clans.

The Law of the Word

Deceive not those of the Blood, for my House is founded on Truth.

Truth is subjective. Assamites rarely lie to one another, but neither do they feel compelled to keep those with whom they disagree up to date on their plans.

The Law of Judgment

Judge those of Caine’s blood and punish them should they be found wanting.

As with the Law of Destruction, a sharp division exists within the Clan on the question of who deserves punishment and what punishments are appropriate. The Web of Knives demand the ultimate sanction against all vampires outside the Clan for violations against their interpretations of the Laws of Haqim. More humane Assamites look back to the lessons of the wars against the Baali and interpret this as a commandment to fight and punish vampires who prey indiscriminately, or those who truck with demons.

The Castes

The Warriors

The Warrior caste represents a majority of our Clan. Of those, about half joined the Clan through indoctrination into the Web of Knives, while the rest were Embraced according to older traditions. In the latter case, the sire typically chooses a suitable candidate, Embraces her, and then largely leaves her to her own devices with minimal oversight beyond ensuring that she fulfills her tithing obligations to the Clan.

The leader of the Warrior caste is the Caliph, usually the oldest and most powerful of the warriors. Personal power is more important to the office of Caliph than age or respect. Any Warrior can theoretically challenge a Caliph to a duel of honor for any perceived failure in the performance of his duties. There is the expectation that a Caliph who loses such a duel will submit to ritual diablerie by his opponent, assuming he wasn’t destroyed outright before such diablerie could take place.

The current Caliph is Thetmes, a Fifth Generation Egyptian Embraced in 25 B.C.E. He is a devotee of the corrupt version of the Path of Blood, and since he predates Islam by over six centuries, he has very little respect for either its precepts or its practitioners, an attitude that is the source of his antipathy towards the current Old Man. Thetmes rose to the position of Caliph after personally slaying the prior Caliph in combat over his predecessor’s disastrous mishandling of the Siege of Vienna in 1529 C.E. In almost five centuries, no one has ever challenged his authority over the Warrior caste.

They suffer from the Tremere Curse and the Baali Curse, though the former negates the latter. Should anything ever lift the Tremere Curse, the Baali Curse would immediately affect all warriors.

The Viziers

The Viziers represent about a third of the Children. There are very few Viziers found among the Sabbat, but a sizable number are Dispossessed. Viziers fulfill a variety of roles within the Clan. They usually oversee the Assamite’s political or financial interests, but may also serve as researchers, diplomats, historians, or even artists. In many ways, they are the Assamite answer to both the Ventrue and the Toreador, and many Dispossessed Viziers note with some sadness that they generally get along with those Clans better than they do Assamites of the other two castes.

The leader of the Viziers is, well, the Vizier. The fact that the same name is used for both the caste and its leader is sometimes confusing for outsiders, but the Viziers themselves are pretty good at context and always seem to know who they’re talking about. In earlier eras, some Viziers went by the archaic term “Fikri,” but it has fallen out of use. Unlike the Caliph, a democratic vote decides the position of Vizier, after a period of intense politicking and influence peddling. Once elected, the Vizier serves for a term of 63 years, unless he is removed prematurely through whatever means. Viziers may service multiple terms, but not consecutive ones.

The current Vizier is Tegyrius, who is in his third term. Tegyrius was a soldier in life, albeit a high-ranking soldier in Alexander’s armies — in other words, a politically adroit cosmopolite as well as a warrior. For much of the last two centuries, the declining influence of the Viziers over the Children of Haqim has demoralized Tegyrius. However, since the invasion of Iraq, he has become galvanized by his firm conviction that the rise of Ur-Shulgi is imminent. Certain that the Black Shepherd’s impending arrival means nothing good for his caste or for the Clan as a whole, he is the prime mover behind the Preservationist Conspiracy.

They suffer from the Tremere Curse and the Curse of Obsession. A few Viziers have contracted the Baali Curse from their Warrior kin. In such Viziers, the Baali Curse often supplants the Curse of Obsession, to which these Viziers are usually (but not always) immune.

The Sorcerers

The remainder of our Clan belongs to the insular Sorcerer caste. Both the Warriors and the Viziers see great value in the power of the Sorcerers, but neither group quite trusts them. Clan legends pertaining to the Baali are just too ingrained for the typical Assamite to be comfortable around someone who can command demons and djinn with a word. As with the Viziers, there are very few Sorcerers among the Sabbat. There are a few Sorcerers among the Dispossessed, but the rarity of the Sorcerers and the loneliness of their lifestyle compels them to seek the company of others of their kind. Unfortunately, while the Viziers can get along with their own counterparts among the Camarilla, most Sorcerers can’t even sit in the same room with the jealous and paranoid Tremere without a magical duel breaking out. A pity, since most members of the Camarilla would be delighted to deal with thaumaturges who didn’t attach as many strings as the Tremere did.

The leader of the Sorcerer caste is the Amr, a position that has been synonymous with Al-Ashrad for nearly two thousand years. A mage himself for well over five centuries even before his Embrace, Al-Ashrad defines the post of Amr so completely there is only one Assamite of antiquity who is a match for his power. Unfortunately, that Assamite — Ur-Shulgi — is the one Al-Ashrad most fears will emerge to make that challenge, which is why the Amr has joined Tegyrius’s conspiracy. Al-Ashrad is not alone in his origins, as a small but vital percentage of the Sorcerers were mortal mages prior to the Embrace. Some of them have even retained connections to their prior occult affiliations, which can occasionally provide valuable intelligence to the Children.

The Sorcerers suffer from the Tremere Curse and the Curse of Prominence. A few Sorcerers have contracted the Baali Curse from their Warrior kin. In such sorcerers, the Baali Curse usually supplants the Curse of Prominence, but some Sorcerers suffer from both.

Politics Among the Assamites

The Du’at is the collective name for the Caliph, the Vizier, and the Amr, and on paper, they all have equal power and equal status. In practice, the Caliph outranks the other two and isn’t afraid to let them know it; although the Old Man does what he can to restrain the Caliph, and regularly defers to the Amr and Vizier within their areas of expertise.

Below the Caliph is the Silsila, an informal court consisting of Alamut’s permanent resident warriors. In earlier nights, the Silsila consisted of equal numbers of the three castes, but Warriors have dominated it for the last millennium. As such, it has ceased to be an advisory body and has instead become the Caliph’s private army for ensuring the Warriors’ dominance over the other two castes. The Web of Knives tends to view the Silsila as the informal priesthood of the Cult of Haqim. Naturally, Assamites outside that faction are less respectful of the Silsila, though usually not to their faces. The Silsila also acts as a point agency for outsiders who wish to contract with Assamites for assassination purposes. If a Cainite finds that she needs an Assamites to kill for her and she is not incompetent, she will eventually make contact with the representative of one of the Silsila, who will then contact her for negotiations.

Counterbalancing the Silsila is the Council of Scrolls, an advisory body of fifteen Assamites consisting primarily of Viziers and Sorcerers, though no ban exists preventing Warriors from membership. The Eldest and the Du’at are barred from membership in order to prevent conflicts of interest. Each member of the Council is considered the Clan’s expert-in-residence when it comes to whatever matter falls within that seat’s purview.

The Web of Knives

Founded at the dawn of the twelfth century C.E., the Web of Knives is a death cult. Its founders were all hardline Assamite Warriors who disapproved of the effect that Islam had on their Clan in general. These founders sought to forge a technique for transitioning new recruits directly from mortal existence into the brutal, blood-soaked world of their new religion. When one of the Dervishes finds a mortal who is exceptionally skilled at combat, he gives the mortal the opportunity to join the Children. Sometimes, he is even honest enough to say that the alternative is death.

The new recruit spends the next several years at one of the group’s secret training facilities where he learns every form of combat and every technique for assassination, as well as being brainwashed into the group’s religious dogmas. Most don’t make it and end up tossed into unmarked graves dug by fellow recruits to show them the price of failure. Those who survive long enough to impress their masters become ghouls, and spend more years learning how to kill supernatural beings as easily as other mortals, all while becoming even more devoted to the Web of Knives and the Path of Blood. Typically, this phase of the training lasts for seven years or so, at which point survivors who have proven their loyalty have one final test: the targeted assassination of a specific individual about whom the initiate has no information save a name and a picture. Those who succeed receive the reward of the Embrace. The penalty for failure is self-evident.

While the order was founded in the twelfth century C.E., it did not recruit a single female until the eighteenth, and the number of females since then can be counted on one hand. For most of its existence, the Web of Knives was a small organization, although its political influence was wildly disproportionate to its size. Warrior Assamites who did not belong to the organization nevertheless admired its dedication and intensity. During the first Gulf War, the Web of Knives sought to increase its size and stature with a “recruitment drive” of military personnel (both Middle Eastern and Allied soldiers) who demonstrated field competence. By the time the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003 C.E., those recruits had been vampires for five years and were completely devoted to the Web of Knives. They, in turn, led the next round of recruitment, this time of soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as particularly skilled terrorists and insurgents. The recruits of that “class” have only just completed their training. Its sudden and precipitous growth is one of the main factors that led to the birth of Tegyrius’s plans for defection.

All members of the Web of Knives are devoted followers of the Path of Blood (as reimagined by the group’s founders), and most of them long for the day when the Tremere Curse is lifted and they can pursue apotheosis through diablerie, as well as fulfilling Haqim’s command that they exterminate all other Cainites. All of them believe the Clan origin that states that Haqim seized the power of the Blood for himself in order to fight against Caine’s evil, that the Warriors were Haqim’s first childer with the “lesser castes” coming later, and that godhood is obtainable through diablerie.

The Preservationist Conspiracy

The Preservationist Conspiracy is a faction so new that it barely has a name. The conspiracy is the brainchild of the Vizier Tegyrius and the Amr Al-Ashrad, both of whom have concluded that the Children of Haqim are doomed so long as they remain on their present course. The Web of Knives is out of control, and their lust for violence has turned much of the Middle East into a charnel house. They reject both Islam and modernity in favor of a debased ideology that calls for genocide against all Cainites.

However, the Web of Knives alone would not be an insurmountable obstacle. What tips the scales towards treason against the rest of the Clan are the clear signs of Baali moving behind the scenes, and the possibility of one of the most terrifying Methuselahs in the world rising to purge the Clan. Neither Tegyrius nor Al-Ashrad has any illusions about which factions are likely targets for purging, nor which faction will lead the purge. Accordingly, desperate measures are necessary to preserve the true legacy of the Children of Haqim.

So was born the Preservationist Conspiracy. For the last decade, the Vizier and the Amr have been recruiting and laying the groundwork for a mass defection of Assamites who share their socio-political views to other sects, whether it’s to the Camarilla, the Sabbat, the Ashirra (a multi-Clan alliance of Muslim vampires active across the Middle East), or some combination of the above. At present, the Conspiracy includes a bare majority of the Viziers and the Sorcerers. The rest are Warriors who don’t fit within the loyalist paradigm, either because of extreme devotion to Islam or simply opposition to the barbarism of the Path of Blood. Those who have demonstrated the most loyalty to the Conspiracy and the most political and social acumen have already been sent abroad to form connections, gain allies, and pave the way for more refugees if and when the Final Nights begin. Among such forerunners, the Viziers and the Sorcerers gravitate towards Camarilla territories. The former have had good luck posing as Toreador. The latter must usually pose as Caitiff and hope that no one asks too many questions.

The Assamite Antitribu

Many Kindred mistakenly assume that the Assamite antitribu represent a separate bloodline. That is untrue. The antitribu are simply Assamite Warriors who are not subject to the Tremere Curse. Among the Tremere, the conventional explanation for that oddity is that the antitribu had already abandoned their Clan before the curse took hold, and thus they were not subject to the sympathetic magic. Among the Assamite Sorcerers, more sinister theories hold sway, theories suggesting that those who became the antitribu somehow invoked the power of the Baali to overcome the magic of the Tremere. Regardless, the “Free Assamites” found that they had no place among the Children, and so they offered their blades to the Sabbat, which was eager to accept. There, the Angels of Caine could sate their lust for vitae and their desire to lower their Generation via diablerie without sanction.

Few outside the antitribu understand it, but there are really two factions of Assamites in the Sabbat. The first wave of Assamite antitribu consists primarily of elders who clearly remember their time among the Children. To them, the Sabbat is a means to an end — the destruction of the Camarilla and especially the Tremere so that the rest of the Clan can be freed. In that capacity, those elders became the backbone of the Black Hand, the military generals of the Sabbat.

However, as part of their duties, those Assamite elders were forced to Embrace haphazardly and without opportunity to teach their childer the ways of the Assamite Clan. Further complicating matters is the fact that one of these “Assamite ways” is the Path of Blood, which would be heretical to any Sabbat priests who learned of it, so the antitribu must walk a fine line. As a result, the younger Assamites know nothing of the Clan’s history, of the legends of Haqim, or of the castes. They know only that they hunger for the blood of Cainites. Moreover, to the extent that they have learned anything about Haqim, the younger antitribu have learned that he’s an Antediluvian who will someday rise to kill everyone. This does not endear the antitribu to the Children of Haqim, and vice versa.

The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed are not really a faction. Indeed, they are arguably the antithesis of a faction, as historically, the Assamites use the term to describe what other Kindred would refer to as “Autarkis” — that is to say, Assamites who want nothing to do with other Assamites. The term is ancient, and reportedly used after the fall of the Second City to describe clan members who sought their own destinies instead of journeying with Haqim to Alamut. Arguably, the Preservationist Conspiracy can be viewed as a large group of “soon-to-be Dispossessed,” but it’s really more accurate to say that the Preservationists want an Assamite Clan of their own, while the true Dispossessed merely wish to be left to their own devices.

The Thousand-Meter Club

The Thousand-Meter Club is a social group. Instead of an alliance based on ethnicity, club members unite in their mutual respect for mastery of a single weapon: the sniper rifle. Membership is extended to any Assamite who successfully assassinates a target from a distance of 1,000 meters or more without the use of any Disciplines. The unofficial founder is Sgt. Randy Hopkirk, a U.S. Marine sniper from Alabama who had over fifty confirmed kills in World War II before his sire selected him for the Embrace. There are no official requirements for joining the Thousand-Meter Club other than a confirmed kill from at least 1,000 meters. As a practical matter, however, that usually requires exceptional skill with firearms.

Kairouan Brotherhood

A family of inbred ghouls, created by the Assamite Sorcerers of Al-Qayrawan as a method of studying and experimenting after the Assamites encountered the Tzimisce revenants in Europe. Rumors say that the Warrior caste drove the mystics out of Alamut for their “unnatural” experiments, but this family continues in the modern nights. Some are merchants and deal with the Viziers more than other Assamites, while others still have ties to the Sorcerer caste.

Assamite Weaknesses

Given the diversity of the Assamites and the unusual number of curses levied against them over their history, they’re spelled out below.

The Curse of Growing Darkness

All Assamites suffer from this. For younger Assamites, this is a minor inconvenience — after a century, most Caucasians will look vaguely well-tanned, most Arabs and Middle Easterners will look dusky, and most Africans will have ebony skin.

After three to five centuries, the skin tone becomes distinctly unnatural. There are, after all, no ethnicities in the world whose skin tone is literally jet-black, which is common among Assamite elders. An Assamite elder who is more than five centuries old suffers a +1 Difficulty to Social rolls among mortals due to their unusually dark skin tone. An elder who is more than a thousand years old suffers a +3 Difficulty and looks distinctly inhuman, though not as disturbing as the typical Nosferatu or Tzimisce. Both of these penalties can be overcome with appropriate levels of Obfuscate.

Most Assamites think this curse is an inversion of the minor curse on the other clans, who generally grow paler as time passes. The Amr, who for some reason is immune to this curse, is of the opinion that the Curse of Growing Darkness was the original curse levied on the clan by Caine, and that the other various clan weaknesses came later.

The Baali Curse or the Curse of Hunger

This curse — an unquenchable thirst for Kindred vitae — currently afflicts only the Assamite antitribu. Until the imposition of the Tremere Curse, it afflicted many of the Warrior caste and a few members of the Vizier and Sorcerer caste. Now the curse has spread. Although this curse is presently dormant in mainline Assamites, if the Tremere Curse were lifted, it would likely return with a vengeance. In such a case, the Curse of Hunger would automatically take root in all Warrior caste Assamites. For Viziers and Sorcerers, suffering this curse on top of their normal caste curses constitutes a 3-point Flaw.

The Curse of Obsession

This curse afflicts the Vizier caste. Its origins are unknown, and it may date back to the Second City. It manifests as an Obsessive-Compulsive disorder.

The Curse of Prominence

This curse afflicts the Sorcerer caste. The Amr claims that this “curse” is actually benign and that it is merely a natural result of their magical heritage, rather than a punishment levied against the caste. It manifests as an unusually vivid aura that marks all Sorcerers as having magical power in the eyes of anyone with Auspex or comparable mystic senses.

The Tremere Curse or the Curse of Blood

This curse afflicts all Assamites other than the antitribu. It causes Assamites to suffer a deadly allergic reaction to the consumption of Kindred vitae. If Ur-Shulgi rises, it is likely he will lift this curse as his first act.