Adeptus Arbites

The Adeptus Arbites are the hard fist of Imperial law, an arm of the Adeptus Terra charged with enforcing the Lex Imperialis upon every world that bows to the Golden Throne. They are not concerned with the petty crime that occupies local enforcers, the theft, the murder, the unpaid tithe, for such matters are beneath them. The Arbites exist to guard the greater order: to crush the corruption that threatens the Emperor's rule, to see the Imperial Tithe delivered, and to stamp out the first sparks of heresy, witchery, and xenos taint before they can catch and spread.

Upon an Imperial world the Arbites answer to no local governor or magistrate. They are the last and most absolute authority, bound only to their own commanders and to the Judges of the systems and sectors above them, and they have been granted the right to serve as judge, jury, and executioner over any citizen who breaks the Emperor's law. The whole vast institution is overseen from the Hall of Judgement upon Terra by the Grand Provost Marshal, who holds a seat among the High Lords, with the Marshals of the Court commanding star-spanning precincts beneath him.

Internally the Arbites divide into two callings. The Judges devote themselves to the law itself, to the ten millennia of accumulated case law and precedent by which the Imperium is ruled. The Arbitrators are the militant arm, the armoured enforcers who go out to apprehend and to punish. Sheathed in black carapace and enclosing, rebreather-fitted helms, wielding combat shotguns, power mauls, and suppression shields, they descend from their fortress-precincts upon lawbreakers as living proof that the Emperor's justice, however long delayed, is never in the end escaped.