Gideon Ravenor

The Injury

Gideon Ravenor was a junior Inquisitor and Eisenhorn's star interrogator when, on Thracian Primaris in 338.M41, a terror-bombing during a state visit by an off-world dignitary engulfed his position. He was the only survivor of his cohort. The fire took most of his body. The Apothecary corps salvaged what could be salvaged: a brain, partial spinal column, the rudimentary glands needed to keep both functional. The rest was burned away.

Ravenor woke in a hover-chair of his own design. He has never since left it.

The Method

Lacking a body, Ravenor compensated with telepathy. He is one of the more powerful psykers in the Inquisition, capable of inhabiting his agents' minds for the length of an operation — seeing through their eyes, speaking through their mouths, sensing what they sense. His team — Kara, Patience, Carl, the savant Wystan, the assassin Nayl — operates almost as extensions of his single consciousness.

This arrangement gives him a tactical advantage no embodied Inquisitor can match. It also gives him a perspective on personhood that, by his own admission, has slowly become less human than he intended.

I am where I am needed. I am in the room. I have always been in the room.

— Ravenor, telepathic projection

The Helican Subsector

Ravenor's defining cases unfolded in the Helican subsector, where the deeply embedded narcotic trade in a substance called Flects — fragments of a forbidden xenos mirror — concealed an older conspiracy involving Chaos-warp manipulation of fate itself. The investigation ran for years across three novels. Ravenor went, repeatedly, off-grid. He survived the campaign. So did, just barely, his team.

The Break with Eisenhorn

At some point during the Helican campaign Ravenor became aware of the extent of Eisenhorn's radicalism. He filed the necessary reports. The Conclave declined to act. He has subsequently treated Eisenhorn as a quarry rather than a mentor, with the personal grief that distinction implies.

The Bequin trilogy chronicles the resulting cold war between the two former colleagues.