Justicars: the asari order that answers only to the Code

A justicar was an asari who had forsworn children, family and every worldly possession except her weapons and armour, and who had sworn herself instead to the Code of the Justicars. Members of this ancient order wandered the space of the Asari Republics righting wrongs as the Code defined them, answering to no government and to no court. They were few, because the training killed many who attempted it and because the life that followed was rarely easy, and their reputation ran far enough that pirates would abandon a planned raid on learning that one was present. The order was compared by Samara, one of the last of them, to the knights errant of an old human age and to the samurai of feudal Japan.

An order apart#

The justicars belonged to no ministry and reported to no magistrate. They operated inside asari space, correcting injustices by means that were often harsh and frequently fatal, and it was rare for one to travel beyond the borders of the Republics because her presence among other species risked a diplomatic incident. That reluctance was well founded. A code that recognised no ambiguity translated poorly among aliens who did not share asari morality and had never agreed to be judged by it.

Entry to the order cost everything a normal asari life contained. A justicar renounced the possibility of children and of family, which for a species whose lifespan ran to a millennium and whose culture was built around long relationships was a heavier renunciation than it might appear. She kept her weapons and her armour and nothing else. The training that followed carried a high mortality rate, and the survivors were correspondingly rare.

The Code#

The Justicar Code was the centre of a justicar's existence, a body of more than five thousand sutras describing every situation a justicar might conceivably face. Each justicar was required to know the whole of it by heart. Samara described justice, for her, as following the Code, nothing more and nothing less, while acknowledging that this was not as simple as it sounded and that many would criticise so uncompromising a doctrine.

The Code admitted no morally grey action. Every deed fell cleanly into right or wrong, and the remedy it commonly prescribed for wrongdoing was death. Officer Dara, an asari official working in Nos Astra on Illium, stated flatly that anyone attempting to bribe a justicar would be gunned down where they stood. The absolutism cut in the other direction as well, and Detective Anaya, who ran a precinct in the same city, held that a justicar would as readily give her life to defend one honest police officer as to fight an army of dishonest ones.

Samara admitted that the harshness of the Code made curiosity a liability. If she was going to be required to kill a murderer, she preferred not to learn anything about him that might redeem him in her eyes. The Code left no room to act on what she had learned, so learning it served only to make the killing harder.

The Oaths of Subsumation#

The oaths a justicar swore were called the Oaths of Subsumation. They pledged protection of the innocent, punishment of the guilty, and defence of common law and the norms of asari society. That last clause carried a consequence the Republics valued highly: a justicar would never overthrow a sitting government. However unjust an administration might be judged, the order preserved existing asari law rather than staging a coup, which meant that the deadliest independent agents in asari space were structurally incapable of becoming a political faction.

One oath stood apart. The Third Oath of Subsumation bound a justicar to the will of another with total loyalty, and while it held it overrode even the dictates of the Code. The binding was not permanent, and it was not safe for whoever invoked it. On release from the oath, a justicar was free to kill the one she had served if that service had forced her into acts she considered deeply dishonourable.

Fighters#

Justicars were formidable in almost every form of personal combat and were known to have destroyed entire bands of mercenaries and slavers single handed. At least one fought a Spectre to a draw. Their advantage came from time as much as talent. Over decades and in some cases centuries of dedicated training, a justicar refined the natural biotic aptitude of her species to a level of power and finesse that rivalled an asari matriarch.

The reputation that followed from this was practical rather than ceremonial. Aggressors who learned that a justicar was in the area called off planned raids rather than test her. Given the sacrifices involved, the skill and the rigid adherence to the Code, justicars were held in high regard across asari culture, and there were many stories and vids made of their exploits, though much of what those vids showed was exaggerated.

Justicars and the law#

Relations between the order and asari civil authority were uneasy. Police forces generally found a justicar's presence unnerving and yet let her work, out of respect for what she was. Officials at a higher level were less accommodating, and often saw justicars as threats to the peace rather than as its guardians, precisely because merciless absolutism led so easily to violent confrontation, above all with aliens who neither understood nor accepted asari morality.

The Code addressed the collision directly and briefly. A justicar was permitted to submit to detainment by lawful authorities for a single day. Once that day expired she was bound by the Code to resume her duties, whatever her captors intended, and the likely result was violence between the justicar and the people holding her. It was a rule that gave local police one day to solve their problem, and Anaya, ordered by superiors who feared a cross species incident to detain Samara on Illium, understood that the clock left her own life at risk.

The Ardat-Yakshi duty#

Among the burdens the Code laid on the order was its handling of the Ardat-Yakshi, asari whose condition made mating lethal to their partners. Those who could be safely sequestered were brought to monasteries, and the justicar Phora was known to have delivered several to the monastery on Lesuss by threatening and terrifying them into coming with her. Those who could not be sequestered were, by the Code's requirement, to be put to death.

The order's most famous member found the limit of her own doctrine there. Samara's daughters carried the condition, and one of them, Morinth, had spent centuries embracing it. Faced at last with the obligation to execute her last surviving child, Samara attempted to take her own life instead. Whether the Code compelled such a suicide in cases where a justicar could not fulfil her duties was never established, and her attempt is not evidence that it did.

The order in the Reaper War#

When the Reaper invasion reached asari space, some justicars broke their solitary habit and returned to Thessia to reinforce the defence of their homeworld. It was the kind of decision the Code could accommodate and the order could not afford. Their numbers had always been small, and estimates held that even if the Reaper War ended in victory the justicars might not exist afterwards at all.

The order was never entirely closed. Justicars could and did leave it, among them Tristana and the asari duelist who abandoned the Code and later doubted the choice. But leaving was rare, the training killed many who tried to enter, and an order that never recruited in numbers had nothing to replace the losses of a war fought across every world the Republics held.