Quietus

Disciplines / Discipline Techniques

In the corner of a bedroom on the South Side

There's a large,

Circular brown stain on the shag floor

That the landlord can't scrub away.

Possible renters skirt around

What they hope is wine.

The thing is,

Dead people don't drink.

- "Blood" by M.M. Jones

Introduction to Quietus

Quietus is the province of the Banu Haqim, the vampires whom European Cainites call Assamites or Saracens, and they guard its secrets jealously. Within the clan, it is the warrior caste that is most closely associated with Quietus, and its current applications largely revolve around the use of blood poisoning to kill. The vizier and sorcerer castes have equal claim to the Discipline in the clan's legendary, however, and they make use of it in subtly different ways to aid their tasks of mystic exploration and subtle governance.

The scholars of Alamut recount that Haqim himself developed Quietus after a long period of self-exploration. By examining his own blood, he unlatched the secrets of affecting others' vitae. He used these secrets to impose Caine's law on the Second City and to punish those who contravened it. When the revolt of the third generation began and Haqim's siblings expelled him from their usurper kingdom, his mastery of the Blood allowed him to escape and found a tripartite clan of his own. Ever since then, his children have seen themselves as separate from Caine's other get, purer and stronger judges of the righteous use of blood. Quietus is the premier expression of that belief.

Ironically, the very strength of the blood-poisoning arts can also be a vulnerability. The details are secrets of the elders, but it seems that - just as a master Charlatan must momentarily fool himself in order to deceive others with Chimerstry and madness is a prerequisite for the use of Dementation - the use of Quietus creates a subtle taint in the blood of those who use it. This taint manifests itself as the caste weaknesses of the various lines of Banu Haqim' and in an overall susceptibility to blood curses on the clan. Assamite individuals are no more vulnerable, the sorcerers say, but blood curses tend to infect clanmates at a prodigious rate. The most glaring example of this, of course, is the curse set upon the Assamite warrior caste by the dark bloodline known as the Baali.