Lord Marshal Luthir Goreman

“The dream comes often. I know it very well now. I stand at the doors to a great Basilica, one that exists only in my dream. Above me in the wall is a stained-glass, the Golden Throne and the Aquila spreading its wings. I weep to look up at them. Around me are more windows, every branch of the Adeptus, and below them stand the Emperor’s servants in their livery, singing praise to the eagle. The building lurches and grinds, the windows shudder as though about to splinter. The earth beneath the Basilica is subsiding. This beautiful temple is being held on the shoulders of a great mass of grey, faceless forms, who squabble and ignore their burden. The whole of them shift under the cathedral like sand. I strike with my maul, and these shapes fall silent and still for a moment. But this does not last. No matter how relentless the blows, they will not stay resolute. It comes to me that I will spend forever doing this, that they will never have strength other than that I beat into them for a moment. It is then that I wake.”
—Lord Marshal Goreman
For Arbitor Luthir Veremonn Goreman, Lord Marshal of
the Calixian Great Precinct, every medal pinned to his dress
uniform, every honorific and citation attached to his name,
every pennant, seal, and chain hanging from the plaque atop
his staff of office, all prove the same thing: that he is right in his
ironclad disdain for the great mass of the Imperium’s populace.
Goreman hails from the once-grand Sorascine Canyon
conurbation on Sinophia, steeped in all the many kinds of decay
that that world had to offer. He was born into an extended
family of butchers and flesh-thieves, descended from once proud
dynasties of medicae and lay biologis adepts back when the
world had been in its prime. The old family seat, with its surgical
chambers and tissue molds, where generations ago the subsector’s
nobility had come for medicae and juvenat treatments, or
to buy exquisitely flesh-sculpted servitors, had become a charnel
house. Their old family name now lost, the Gore-Men conducted
a lively and ruthless trade in spare organs and tissues to any who
could meet their price, and trained their young man in the brutal
skills needed to ensure a constant supply of “donors.”
That was Luthir’s work, and he excelled at it until the day he
was sent to subdue and bring back an offworlder who had set
up house in one of the neighboring habstacks, and he never
returned. The woman Luthir was to abduct was a former Enforcer
from Scintilla who had left her post after a religious awakening
and come to Sinophia as a wandering Confessor. Luthir slipped
into the shrine during a prayer meet, shock-fork and slap-syringe
at the ready, planning to spring an ambush once her small
congregation had left. But as he listened from the shadows her
words began to sink in, and the fire in her voice lit up his soul. At
the end of the prayers, when the supplicants had gone, Luthir the
Gore-Man came forward with his hands in a clumsy sign of the
Aquila, hoarsely begging for his confession to be heard.
Luthir Goreman stayed at the shrine for a week, learning
prayers and listening to sermons and scriptures, and to his
Confessor’s stories of her Magistratum days. Of all the
expressions of the God-Emperor’s will that she was able
to teach to him, her experience as an enforcer was the one
that resonated with him the most. He listened to her talk
of stamping order into the face of disloyalty and anarchy,
and reflected on the cynical, treacherous, nihilistic wastes
that were the lives of his clan-family. He imagined himself
in a Magistratum uniform, weapon in hand, battering the
worthless human detritus into shape with the force of his
arm, his will, and his faith. Within a month he had made the
trek to the Horst-Kosada Hive, home the Governor’s personal
enforcement militia, the so-called Wide Cohort.
Every day in the Cohort’s gold-and-black uniform was an
insult to the ideals that had ignited Luthir in that little shrine
in the slums. Barely trained, and treated with contempt by
the cliquish nepotisim around him, Goreman watched his unit
divide its time between lounging in its palatial barracks amid
the spoils of its many extortion and protection rackets, and
swaggering about the capital, bullying and terrorizing anyone
the Cohort thought might be incurring the Governor’s
displeasure, or their own. All that it taught him was that the
sneering shiftlessness he had learned to despise ran all the
way up through Sinophian society. It was a cruel realization,
and it wasn’t long before he was looking for an escape. Once
again it came from the Adeptus, but this time his salvation
found him; in the form of a brutal Arbites roundup of the
Wide Cohort. Another platoon’s plans to steal from an
Administratum tithe-train had reached the ears of the
Detectives, and like a scalpel through gangrenous flesh
the Arbites were cutting into the Cohort to see how far
the rot had spread. The interrogators were somewhat
startled when they brought in the fresh young
recruit with the fierce eyes; instead of cowering or
lying, he seemed viscerally pleased by the thought
of his corrupt fellows facing Imperial justice, and
by the end of the interview he had almost turned
the interrogation around, quizzing the Detectives on
the Adeptus, its law, and its enforcement. By the time
the cull was over, Goreman had gone from being
a suspect to being a recruit.
This was what he had wanted. This was his
calling. This was what had kept him going through
the long trek to join the Wide Cohort. Now Goreman was
finally part of something he could believe in, enforcing the
ideals that were burned into him by the Confessor’s words.
Doing the work of an Arbitrator filled Goreman with a
ferocious pride. His early posting was riot-breaking on
Barsapine. He then distinguished himself in punitive
culls in Gunmetal City, hunting fish-poacher rigs on
Spectoris, and spending many distinguished years
in the honor garrison at the Lucid Palace itself
before taking command of the Precinct Fortress that
governed Scintilla. By now his reputation was firmly
cemented in the Arbites command: his iron will, the
force of his personality, and the constant, simmering
anger that blunted his undeniable charisma (and,
some said, took the edge off his judgment).
Goreman took command of Scintilla at a troubled time,
when the Precinct Superior was being targeted by a violent
outlaw insurgency from without and vicious schisms and
feuds from within. Goreman’s response was to denounce the
same root cause for both: a backslide into moral laziness and
foppish intellectual degeneracy, and a show of strength was
the only cure. With the support of then Lord Marshal Kheth,
Goreman purged his Precinct from bottom to top, personally
drawing up the cull lists and overseeing the denunciations
before each consignment of demoted Arbites was marched
away to the penal transports. The longer it dragged on
the more controversial the purge became. Goreman, the
accusations went, was now forgetting about ending the
internal tribulations of the Precinct and using the purge as
a blunt instrument to rid his Precinct of anyone whose idea
of the law did not exactly match his own. The persecution
of the Praetors’ Chamber in Hive Tarsus seemed especially
egregious. Faced with the assassination of two senior Judges
there, Goreman asserted that the Chamber had brought it on
themselves with their degenerate focus on book-study at the
expense of martial action. The token effort at tracking the
assassins was matched by the wholesale reassignment of the
Judicial contingent to front-line duties on the Tarsine docks.
When Kheth was replaced as Lord Marshal by Jhemek-Naad, a Judge from the Scarus Precinct Fortress, Goreman
was forced into a more moderate role. His new commander
had no time for the entrenched Calixian bias against the
Judiciary, and actively worked to re-establish libraries,
exegetic academies, and fully-constituted legal trials
throughout her command. Goreman was one of her most
outspoken opponents for years, his private tirades against her
becoming the stuff of minor legend within his command, but
he had no choice but to follow orders, and as years passed
he seemed to accustom himself to the new regime and
spoke little of it. After complications to a deep-regen juvenat
treatment on his hundred and eighth birthday he spent six
months convalescing on Quaddis and seemed a changed,
more mellow man when he returned.
That lasted for another six years, until Jhemek-Naad
departed to make a second pilgrimage to Earth, accompanying
a casket full of legal relics recovered from Valon Urr. Arbitor
Vey Orloph, commander of the Pendulum High Precinct,
was brevetted to fill in the command while the Grand
Precinct formally appointed a successor, but within two years
of the temporary commander being sworn in the succession
was sinking into controversy. Orloph’s immediate objective
seemed to be to roll back the work of his predecessor in
rooting out the Great Precinct’s prejudices and rebalancing
its organization, and the operations of the Precinct began to
stall as commanders sympathetic to Jhemek-Naad’s agenda
effectively withdrew their obedience to their new superior.
News of the gridlock convinced an exasperated Great Precinct
command to promote Goreman to the Lord Marshal’s post
with a simple charter: get the damned organization working
again. Goreman took office in a curt, abbreviated version of
the full ordination ceremony and within a day was prowling
the upper levels of the Fortress of the Just, barking orders and
demanding reports.
Every time Goreman looks out upon the mass of Imperial
citizenry he sees exactly the same thing he remembered from
Sinophia: dissipated, lazy, disobedient wastrels slouching
through aimless and worthless lives. To him, the Imperial
Adeptus is the one worthy creation of human society, to
serve in it the one worthy ambition. The Adeptus, under the
guidance of the Immortal Emperor, shows the rest of humanity
what they could be had they the discipline, the faith, and the
strength. Those outside the Adeptus are contemptible, and
should think themselves lucky they are allowed to toil to
support it; those who disobey or disrespect the Adeptus, or
even court ambitions outside it, are beneath contempt.
Goreman’s vigor for his job is not born out of a positive
inspiration to bring order but by his smoldering hatred of
those who disrupt it. This makes him relentless in keeping
his grip on disobedience and sedition, but some in the
senior ranks are starting to think that his savagery in dishing
out punishment is corroding the rigid adherence to the Lex
Imperialis to which the Arbites swear themselves. Too willing
to cut corners, the whispers say, too soft on Abstractionism and
unorthodox free-agent behavior like the Divisio Immoralis.
The laws and traditions of the Arbites have been crystal-clear
for ten millennia, they say---what manner of Arbitor, let alone
an Arbitor General, refuses to trust them and bypasses them in
this way? Lord Marshal Orloph has found himself at the center
of this dissatisfaction, somewhat against his will; he considers
himself dutiful and bound by the Grand Precinct’s decision. If
another high-ranked Arbitor appears more willing to encourage
these whisper campaigns they may be able to gather support
among the broader commands and the Grand Precinct may
find themselves with another schism on their hands.
Luthir Goreman is of average height and lean of build,
which surprises people who have seen the portraits and
statues portraying him as a muscular giant. His complexion is
pale, his eyes and hair grey, and his features broad, stern and
handsome. He wears a black and gold Arbitrator dress uniform
for most of his duties, with his rank pins and medals arranged
on a separate banner that is carried to formal occasions by
an adjutant. He always has a small purity seal pinned to his
left lape, copying a verse of Imperial scripture onto a new
parchment each morning and having a garrison preacher
bless and attach the seal at his private morning prayers.