Yorek Thurr

Yorek Thurr was a Salusan politician and a feared member of the inner League of Nobles, the long-standing head of the Jipol, the Jihad Police, during the Butlerian Jihad. From an early stage he held secret allegiances to both the thinking machines and the Titans, betraying humanity even as he orchestrated purges in its name. Denied the supreme office he coveted, he fled to the Synchronized Worlds, received the machines' life-extension treatment, and engineered the plagues that devastated the League, ultimately boasting responsibility for the deaths of a hundred billion people.

Rise through the Jipol#

Yorek Thurr was born around 214 BG on Salusa Secundus, then the capital of the League of Nobles. The blood of the Butlerian Jihad was first spilled on Earth while he was still a teenager, and at the war's outbreak he was pursuing a career as an ambitious young detective. In 194 BG he was recruited by Grand Patriarch Iblis Ginjo and the Salusan High Priestess Saint Serena Butler to lead an investigation team hunting human spies for the thinking machines. After a year of disturbing findings, he submitted a report claiming that machine agents were planted among prominent League members, all of whom were duly executed.

Recognizing the young Salusan's political talent, Ginjo made him part of the newly formed Jipol, the Jihad Police, where Thurr rose rapidly and eventually took command. At the core he was a self-serving opportunist who used the holy war to maneuver himself into permanent positions of power. He specialized in discovering minor traitors, political enemies, and scapegoats, yet at the same time he secretly transmitted reports to Corrin, the capital of the Synchronized Empire, becoming a chief source of intelligence for the evermind Omnius.

Head of the Jipol#

Thurr's reign of terror began in earnest with the first major Jipol purge in 191 BG, in which seven League representatives, all rivals or critics of Ginjo, were implicated through Thurr's manipulations and interrogated to death. He continued to orchestrate such purges to maintain his power, and as the population grew more paranoid about machine spies, fuelled by Serena Butler's speeches from the City of Introspection, he became ever more prominent and ever more feared.

Over his many years leading the Jipol, Thurr developed sophisticated techniques of deception and observation, able to spy as he wished and to kill a man in a hundred ways. He kept no fixed schedule for waking or sleeping, staying awake for days or surviving on a few hours' rest in bunkers, a habit Ginjo dismissed as amusing paranoia. When he accompanied Ginjo to Poritrin in 175 BG, their ship was engulfed by an asteroid revealed to be the returned Titan Hecate; Thurr killed his companion Floriscia Xico in cold blood to keep the secret weapon known only to himself and Ginjo, then notified the Titan Agamemnon. In 164 BG he opposed the Venport agreement granting VenKee Enterprises patents on foldspace technology, and in revenge he betrayed the travel plans of Aurelius Venport and the Sorceress Zufa Cenva so that the cymek Beowulf could ambush and kill them in the Ginaz system. That same year he helped Ginjo and Serena arrange Serena's martyrdom at the hands of the machines.

King of Wallach IX#

After Ginjo's death, Thurr and Camie Boro rewrote history to vilify Primero Xavier Harkonnen, who had killed Ginjo, and to make a martyr of the late Grand Patriarch, devising the concept of the Three Martyrs. Boro promised Thurr the succession but, after ruling ten years, denied it to him and installed her own son Tambir Boro-Ginjo instead. Feeling utterly betrayed, Thurr faked his death in a ship explosion in 153 BG and fled human space.

Omnius granted him the promised life extension and made him King of Wallach IX, where he crowned himself and built an imposing citadel with columns decorated in bones and a throne built from a heap of skulls. The life-extension treatment damaged his brain and made him an even greater sadist than before. He was the mind behind the Omnius Scourge, developed by the robot Erasmus and the human traitor Rekur Van, and he witnessed the launch of its first batch from Corrin in 108 BG. He also urged the Titan Agamemnon to expand his cymek empire on Hessra.

Death on Salusa Secundus#

During the Great Purge that obliterated Wallach IX, Thurr seized an Omnius gelsphere, abandoned the planet, and fled to Corrin, where he was stranded for years in the robot Erasmus's mansion. There he masterminded the piranha mites, a primitive technology that could pass through the scrambler network, which struck Salusa, Rossak, and other worlds in 88 BG and killed hundreds before Abulurd Harkonnen found a way to defeat them. Thurr later escaped Corrin with the help of the independent robot Seurat.

Returning to Salusa Secundus under a false identity, Thurr sought once more the office he had been promised. He stole into Grand Patriarch Xander Boro-Ginjo's chambers, paralyzed his vocal cords, and strangled him when he tried to flee, taking the chain of office for himself. Abulurd Harkonnen recognized the murders as the work of the long-presumed-dead Jipol commander and began a manhunt. When the two men finally confronted each other in Abulurd's laboratory, Thurr hurled the piranha mites at him, but Abulurd activated a field distorter that rendered him invisible to the mites. The mites turned on Thurr, penetrating his Holtzman shield and slowly destroying his body. When guards asked the name of the dead man, Abulurd thought for a while before answering that he was "no one worth remembering."