Gregor Eisenhorn: The Inquisitor Who Became What He Hunted

The most dangerous heretic in the Helican sub-sector once wrote, in his own hand, that radical belief was heresy and that its arguments appalled him. He meant every word. He was Gregor Eisenhorn, inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, and the record of his life is the record of how a man who hunted the Ruinous Powers came to keep a daemon at his side, a forbidden grimoire in his coat and a price on his own head. Reader, I have spent long nights with his sequestered dossiers. This is how the hunter crossed the line he swore to guard, and why he still insists he never crossed it at all.

A Puritan by Calling

Begin with his own creed, for Eisenhorn set it down plainly. ‘I am a puritan by calling and an Amalathian by choice,’ he wrote. The Amalathians took their name from the conclave at Mount Amalath; their doctrine held that the Imperium as it stands is divinely ordained, that change is the greatest enemy, and that the Emperor’s plan is best served by holding the structure of Church and state together. Eisenhorn confessed that the ferocious monodominant creed tempted him at times, but he judged it to have too little subtlety. He preferred to think of himself as staunch and hard-line in his own way, flexible enough to get the work done.

He served the Ordo Xenos in the Helican sub-sector of the Scarus sector, answering to Lord Inquisitor Rorken, under a Grandmaster, Orsini, who had no patience for radical elements. Remember that pairing: a flexible puritan and a hard-line order. The whole tragedy grows from the space between them.

The Necroteuch Affair

The case that made his name began on the frozen world of Hubris, in pursuit of the heretic Murdin Eyclone, and led him to the old noble House Glaw of Gudrun. The Glaw cabal had opened a line of communication with a xenos breed called the saruthi, who had come upon a lost copy of the Necroteuch, a proscribed work of Chaos lore, and agreed to trade it for artefacts of their own. The elder inquisitor Commodus Voke scoffed that the book was a myth. Eisenhorn saw it with his own eyes and felt its evil.

It cost him dearly. Captured by the Glaw, he was tortured by the sadist Gorgone Locke, whose needles left him with nerve damage that fleet surgeons could only partly mend. His face, the records say, became a mask of flesh; he would never smile again. Yet he broke House Glaw, and he destroyed the Necroteuch outright rather than deliver it to the ordo. The Inquisitor Molitor raged at the ‘vandalism’, arguing the book should have been kept for study. Note that argument, reader. In time, Eisenhorn would be living it himself. His investigation had consequences far beyond one noble house: it triggered the mass uprising later known as the Helican Schism, forcing the lord militant who would become Warmaster Honorius to turn his readied armies on his own sub-sector and delay his long-planned purge of Ophidian space. One inquisitor’s case file, in other words, rearranged a crusade. It was also in this affair that he first met a blank-eyed daemon in human form, who introduced itself with a smile: ‘My name is Cherubael.’

The Company He Kept

No inquisitor works alone, and Eisenhorn’s household is as famous as the man. Uber Aemos, his ancient savant, carried a meme-virus that made him a data addict and therefore a peerless researcher; he served Eisenhorn longer than anyone. Godwyn Fischig had been a chastener of the Adeptus Arbites on Hubris, a law-enforcer who came to serve at his side for fifteen decades. Alizebeth Bequin was an untouchable, a psychic blank whose very presence repels the powers of the warp, who later ran an academy of similarly gifted individuals. Eisenhorn called the three of them his rock and his friends.

There was also the Glavian pilot Midas Betancore, dashing in his embroidered cerise jacket, murdered by Fayde Thuring a month before his daughter Medea was born. Medea grew up to wear her father’s jacket and fly for Eisenhorn in her turn. Hold these names close. The story ahead is, among other things, the story of what his choices cost them.

The Great Triumph

On Thracian Primaris, the Day of the Great Triumph was meant to celebrate the Warmaster’s victory in the Ophidian campaign. Instead, aircraft turned on the procession and raked the crowds; Eisenhorn recorded a fog of liquefied tissue in the air. Behind the massacre lay the theft of thirty-three captured heretic psykers of alpha level, and behind the theft stood a name most of the Inquisition believed long dead: Quixos, an inquisitor fallen to the belief that Chaos could be harnessed, who wielded daemonhosts as weapons.

Among the maimed that day was Eisenhorn’s most gifted disciple, Gideon Ravenor, a young man he had expected to see raised to full inquisitor. Ravenor survived only as a mind sealed inside an armoured force chair. Voke died soon after, facing Quixos’s daemonhost Prophaniti. And Eisenhorn, in a moment of amplified will, cast out Cherubael and glimpsed the source of Quixos’s power: the forbidden grimoire known as the Malus Codicium.

Branded Malleus

Here the ground gives way. Whispers reached Rorken that a daemonhost had spared Eisenhorn and that some compact existed between them. Eisenhorn denied it. Then the inquisitor Leonid Osma charged him formally as a daemon-consorting abomination: ‘You are Malleus,’ Osma spat, ‘and you will pay.’ Even Fischig came to ask whether he had been serving a man who consorted with daemons. Eisenhorn swore by the Golden Throne that he was not what Osma said.

He escaped, found allies enough to be heard, and finally brought Quixos to account on Farness Beta. What he did next is the hinge of his life. By his own admission he should have destroyed the Malus Codicium, or surrendered it to the ordo. He did neither. He studied it in secret, grew stronger, broke open cult conspiracies with its insight, and used its lore to capture and bind Cherubael, keeping the daemonhost chained behind warp dampers beneath his estate on Gudrun. He told Fischig, ‘I think I might have become what you’d call a radical. But I’m no heretic.’ Fischig’s reply was simple: ‘Isn’t that what a heretic would say?’

The Price of the Book

The radical road was paid for in friends. Alizebeth Bequin was lost when Eisenhorn tried to master a Titan’s terrible sentience with a runestaff; the backlash overwhelmed even her untouchable nature and broke her mind. Later records note that she died on Durer in 386. Godwyn Fischig, torn between duty and love, confronted his master aboard the dying ship Essene, begged him to renounce the warp, and shot out both his knees to stop him leaving. As Fischig levelled the pistol at his head, Medea Betancore killed him with a needle pistol, weeping.

And Aemos, the faithful savant, confessed that he had summoned Cherubael himself to save them. His meme-virus had let him memorise the Malus Codicium entire. The book Eisenhorn could not bring himself to burn had taken root in the mind of his oldest friend.

Pontius Glaw and the Tomb of Ghül

Behind much of this stood an old enemy. Pontius Glaw, a seventh son of House Glaw dead in body for centuries, survived as an engram sphere in a claw-footed casket, which Eisenhorn had captured after the Necroteuch affair and unwisely preserved. Glaw had fallen, he confessed, by putting on a Chaos-tainted torc gifted by a gladiator he had bought. Restored to a machine body, he hunted the Malus Codicium to reach Ghül, an ancient world of buried cities that an eldar seer said was raised by a race that came from the maelstrom of the warp.

Eisenhorn and Ravenor followed him there. In the daemon-king’s tomb, Eisenhorn named Glaw diabolus and split his head with the sword Barbarisater; the last pages of the diabolic book lay in ash around him, and Cherubael carried its broken master out. The dossier addendum records that Battlefleet Scarus, under Lord Admiral Olm Madorthene, annihilated the planet in 392.M41, with Ravenor supervising its annulment.

Master, Pupil, Quarry

The later archive is darker still. Eisenhorn moves on augmetics now, and speaks of Cherubael as ‘he’, not ‘it’: ‘We have reached an understanding,’ he tells Ravenor. For Ravenor, the reunion is poison. After his own affair with Zygmunt Molotch he was offered a choice by the Holy Ordos: retire and refrain from psionics, or hunt down his old master, the heretic Gregor Eisenhorn. When they meet again, Ravenor’s chair charges its weapons and he states that he is required to detain Eisenhorn as Extremis Diabolus.

It is worth recording what Ravenor became, because it measures what Eisenhorn lost. The addendum to the Glaw dossier notes that Ravenor served the Inquisition for centuries, performed many notable acts, and won his lasting fame as a writer, above all for the work titled The Spheres of Longing. The pupil Eisenhorn once hoped to sponsor became one of the most respected minds of the ordos, and the man charged with bringing his own master in. Neither of them, the records suggest, has ever fully forgiven the other.

In The Magos, Eisenhorn wages what one companion calls a private war, bound for the city of Queen Mab on Sancour, and counts the people who still stand with him on the fingers of one hand. Cherubael appears, insisting it was called, and names itself the only friend he has left. The Bequin novels carry the feud onward through a young woman raised in Queen Mab at the Maze Undue, a school established by the ordos, who answers to the name Alizebeth Bequin.

So did Gregor Eisenhorn become what he hunted? The Holy Ordos say yes, and they have the daemonhost, the grimoire and the dead friends on their side of the ledger. Eisenhorn says no, and he has the Necroteuch burned, Quixos and Glaw destroyed and a sub-sector saved on his. I keep both accounts in this scriptorium, reader, and I notice that he never once smiles in either. Locke took that from him early. Perhaps it was a mercy; a man who wins as he has won should not be able to.

Questions from the Archive

Who is Gregor Eisenhorn in Warhammer 40k?

Gregor Eisenhorn is an inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos in the Helican sub-sector, and the narrator of Dan Abnett’s Eisenhorn novels. He began as a self-described puritan and Amalathian, devoted to preserving the Imperium unchanged, but his war against the heretic Quixos and House Glaw led him to study the forbidden Malus Codicium and bind the daemonhost Cherubael. The ordos later branded him Extremis Diabolus.

Is Eisenhorn a radical or a puritan?

Both, depending on the decade. In Xenos he writes that radical belief is heresy. After Malleus he secretly uses the Malus Codicium and a bound daemonhost, and admits to Fischig that he may have become what others would call a radical, while insisting he is no heretic. The Inquisition’s verdict is harsher: Ravenor is ordered to detain him as Extremis Diabolus.

What is the Necroteuch?

The Necroteuch is a proscribed book of Chaos lore at the heart of Xenos. The heretic Glaw cabal arranged to trade for a lost human copy held by the saruthi, a xenos race who also possessed their own transcription. Eisenhorn destroyed the copy he recovered instead of handing it over for study, an act the Inquisitor Molitor condemned as vandalism.

Who is Cherubael?

Cherubael is a daemonhost, a daemon bound into a human body, first encountered by Eisenhorn in Xenos as the servant of the fallen inquisitor Quixos. Eisenhorn later bound Cherubael himself using the Malus Codicium, and it fought at his side against Pontius Glaw. In later books it claims, with some justice, to be the only friend he has left.

Where should I start reading Eisenhorn?

Start with Eisenhorn: The Omnibus by Dan Abnett, which collects Xenos, Malleus and Hereticus and follows the arc from the Necroteuch to Ghül. Ravenor: The Omnibus follows his crippled former pupil. The Magos continues Eisenhorn’s own story, and the Bequin novels, Pariah and Penitent, bring master and pupil into open conflict.