The Little Tailor of Prague, also known as The Butcher of Prague, is an Old World Tzimisce adept of fleshcrafting war ghouls, a practice that has earned him a truly sinister reputation among his Sabbat peers.
Biography[]
| “ | “The butcher,” the gentleman of Prague repeated the words as if searching for some meaning in them. “The baker. The candlestick maker,” the Little Tailor mused aloud. “Now there’s a moral there somewhere. No, that’s a fable.” He seemed lost in thought. He drummed the tips of his fingers together distractedly. The bone needles clacking together sounded like the rattle of machine-gun fire in the silent chamber. “Do any of you know the one that goes…” the Little Tailor began. “No, never mind, you wouldn’t know.” “All right,” the Tailor chuckled indulgently. “One more, but then it’s off to bed with all of you. Let’s see now. This is one of my favorites. Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty sat on a…” His voice trailed off into a quiet murmuring that, after a while, might have been the beginnings of a snore. “No, that’s right. They couldn’t put him back together, could they?” His eyes remained closed as he spoke and he smiled contentedly. “Well, it was like a jigsaw puzzle, really. Yes, a life-size jigsaw puzzle. First, they had to gather up all the little pieces. And they weren’t likely to find all the little pieces, now were they? No, not if you’ve hidden them well. They’ll never find the pieces. Never find the pieces. Never find…” his voice trailed off into a taunting childish singsong. | ” |
The New World Sabbat called this elder vampire "the little tailor of Prague" once they met him - however, his real name was not revealed. He came to Atlanta with his retinue of Szlachta to take part in the siege of that city. The Tailor was expecting something of a cool reception from his Sabbat 'cousins', but showed little discomfort to it because of his decades of experience among the dungeons of the most notable houses of Europe.
This ancient Tzimisce was no power monger, but a young Lasombra named Sebastian voiced his concerns that the Tailor was there as a favor to Ambrosio Luis Monçada. Alongside the fiend Sascha Vykos, he was responsible for crafting scores of battle ghouls to attack the Camarilla according to the Cardinal's wishes - it is said that the pair was able to create nearly a hundred ghouls of that kind within a week or two. Much differently from Vykos, however, he seemed quite fond of his pitiful creations (monstrous aberrations easily three times his own size), and sobbed in grief as he saw many of them lying dead after the battle for Atlanta has ended.
Appearance[]
Like many of his Tzimisce brethren, the Tailor was not easy to look at. A very slight man, each of his fingers had apparently been stripped of all flesh and sharpened into long, delicate needles of bone. He wagged his finger knowingly, revealing long viscous-looking lines of blackened catgut threaded through his needles. These strands ran along the inside of his palm, over the hump of his wrist and away down his forearm into the recesses of his sleeve. He gave the impression that his hands and arms had been flayed open, revealing the taut lines of vein and artery beneath, but it was not so, for the moist black catgut simply wound over and about his arms, like thread on a spindle.
Trivia[]
- Sascha Vykos, a vampire Embraced in 1002, regarded the Little Tailor as an old one, much older than herself.[1]
Gallery[]
References[]
- VTM: Clan Novel Saga Volume 1: The Fall of Atlanta, p. 150, etc.