Senior Arbiter Kae Drusil

“They’re all around us, they number more than us. They don’t understand how this Imperium works, or they don’t care, or they do understand and they’ve made a conscious decision to turn around and start fighting against the order of things. Our work is unending. And it gets more unending every day. What? Shut up, you know what I meant.”
—Attributed to Senior Arbitrator Kae Drusil
Senior Arbitrator Kae Drusil, Marshal-in-Chief of the Divisio Immoralis, was destined by birth for the other side of the law,
born into a long line of scholars and adepts and apprenticed
to a great-aunt at the Universitariate in the trailing marches
of the Scarus Sector. The family had a distinguished history
of close ties with the Adeptus, even boasting a scattering of
Adept initiates among its numbers, and Kae was told from a
young age that she was to embrace a proper and prestigious
field of study: theology, or maybe poetry and literature of
the better, classical, inner-Segmentum traditions, perhaps the
history and lineages of the better-known aristocratic families
of the sector. Twelve-year-old Kae arrived at her new home
planning only on making the next ten years as painless as
possible, until the inevitable family-enhancing marriage was
arranged and she was given somewhere else to go.
Mere days shy of her fifteenth birthday Kae was working on
a performance piece: a recitation from memory of the names of
the first six hundred Judges to be assigned to the Segmentum
Obscurus and their most notable accomplishments. She had
retreated to a sealed cell in the Universitariate polis originally
built for anchorites, so that she could declaim at full voice
without any mistakes being overheard. Her self-consciousness
about her oratorical style saved her life---the cell was defense
enough against the threadneedle bomb that murdered her
great-aunt and her noble household.
Threadneedle worms are a potent bioweapon, used by the
most expensive assassins for their most prestigious contracts.
When the capsule was popped the wire-fine gene-woven
fungus tendrils grew with sickening speed, seeking out the
human pheromones that had been encoded into their stimulus
matrix, seeding the air with invisibly tiny neurotoxic spores
when they were close enough to feel the warmth of a body. It
was a filthy, ugly way to die.
Kae Drusil remembers the Universitariate Enforcers, with
their frock-coats, silver staves, and wire-lace hoods, and she
remembers the looming, black-armored Arbitrator that
replaced them. She remembers the Judge with the green
augmetic eye and the soft voice, telling her that this crime was
part of something larger that she was too young to understand,
something that had endangered the Adeptus and the practice
of the Lex Imperialis. Kae barely remembers her interrogation.
Hours spent at the hand of the Judge and his staff, recalling
every detail of her families affairs. She recalls calling for the
God-Emperor’s justice, not for her family, but for the Imperium,
whose tithe would suffer without her family’s efforts.
The Judge, whose name she never learned (and never
sought), saw Kae’s faith in the law, and her anger. He believed
that these two traits would make her a fine recruit, and he
was correct. As far as Kae Drusil could tell, that was her
recruitment examination.
Kae Drusil served out her basic training in a half-dozen
unremarkable postings around Thracian Primaris, and
then enrolled in the Judicial cursus. She was quick-witted,
well-read, and loyal, and rose through an orderly series of
promotions. That ended when she was assigned to enforce
quarantine on a refugee fleet that had surged out of a cluster
of systems adjacent to the Eye of Terror, broadcasting frantic
messages about planet-engulfing Warpstorms and dire omens.
The quarantine flotilla was itself broken up by those same
storms. Her ship reunited with its squadron-mates to find
that they had lost eighty years to the Warp, in a voyage that
seemed to last only six storm-tossed weeks. The sole ship
that had broken through on time had been absorbed into the
madness of the refugee enclave it had been sent to contain. The
refugees had succumbed to their taint and become a wolfpack
of corsairs, cutting a path of frightening and seemingly
random atrocities across the Scarus Sector, heading for the
Calixis border. The Arbites commander who had been sent
to take control of the quarantine had slid into desperation,
had seen the massacres of the loyal Arbites and the still-sane
refugees, and left only a few badly damaged pict records of
the events. He never gave up hope that reinforcements would
arrive, his guerilla actions intended to slow the corsairs until
help could arrive.
This was a dark moment for the crews of the other
ships. Drusil’s immediate superior took over command of
what was left of the flotilla and they began a pursuit of the
wolfpack, grimly aware that their own lives would be forfeit
for incompetence if they failed to destroy the threat. As the
pursuit whittled down the pack’s numbers, and scrutiny from
Battlefleet Scarus and the Inquisition grew harsher, the fleet’s
methods grew more ruthless, and more unorthodox. Drusil
found that her role as the new chief Judge aboard the fleet was
less to cite, interpret, and lay down the law for her Arbitrators
to enforce, and more to find ways to pick, choose, and twist
the Imperial Edicts to allow the pursuit to act as it wished:
to tear the taint out of every system the wolfpack fleet had
passed through. Somewhere along the line she found herself
leading not only the delegation of Judges who would land
and bully the planetary Precincts into co-operation or extort
assistance from the local governor and Adeptus, but teams
who would round up, denounce, and summarily execute
swathes of locals among whom wolfpack refugees might have
scattered or whom they might have influenced. Although she
had never formally cross-trained in the detecting arts, she
began to command investigators; by the time the last of the
Pursuit crossed the border into the Calixis Sector she was
being treated as a Detective-Commander rather than as the
Praetor that was still her substantive rank.
She was also fed up and burned out. Her devotion to the
purity of the Law had been tarnished beyond recognition by
what she had been forced to do to keep the tattered cloak
of legality over the pursuit. Her belief in the incorruptibility
of the Arbites and the inevitability of a future rule of perfect
law had been demolished beyond repair by the things she
had been forced to do in pursuit of the wolfpack, all in the
name of the “law.” After the pursuit ended at the Battle of
Cyrus Vulpa, she asked to remain in Calixis once the year-long
investigative tribunal was over. Exhausted and bitter, she
waited in the gardens at Solomon for her next assignment.
What she got was a visit from Arbitor Luthir Goreman.
Goreman had watched the pursuit and its methods
carefully as it came into Calixian space, and unlike Drusil
he had not been shocked by the legal interpretations of
its discipline and methods. Goreman faced heretics that
threatened planets with taint, and it was his way, and that
of his Precinct Fortress, to do what they must to preserve
the law. Talking with Drusil about her experiences he began
to think he had found the person to command the Divisio Immoralis, his new experiment in enforcement. Drusil was
too exhausted to refuse.
These days Kae Drusil tells herself that her earlier shiny
idealism was a self-delusion. There is taint in all things; rather
than provide proof against it, the law simply provides a
handhold by which the Imperium can avoid being immersed
in it. She believes now that the best the Divisio, and the
Arbites in general, can hope for is to blunt the worst excesses
of lawlessness and hope that those they protect are strong
enough to do the rest of the work themselves.
Kae Drusil is a thickset woman with a heavy-jawed,
mournful face under a cap of slicked-back grey hair. Her skin
is a dark copper-tan and her sleepy eyes a startling bright blue.
Her body language is unassuming and she usually converses
in a sighing mutter, but she has a powerful, ringing orator’s
voice when she chooses to use it. Drusil is unsympathetic to
the Calixian Judges and continues to wear her Praetor’s
uniform, adorned with a red collar and the one
medal she will wear, the one she was awarded at
the end of the pursuit.