Corin’s Goals:
1. To weed out dissidents and deserters from among the baatezu
2. To learn the plans and strategies of the tanar’ri and yugoloths.
3. To learn anything else of interest to Baator and the Dark Eight.
4. To humiliate and slay Mephistopheles, Lord of the Eighth.
4. To humiliate and slay Phongor, Grand Inquisitor of Baator.
5. To bring his servants, the Faceless, back under his command.
6. To rediscover his true self.
CORIN is the Minister of Intelligence, the Spymaster of Baator. He is the Mask, the Facade. He is everywhere and nowhere. Every crowd, every building contains his ears and eyes. Sometimes he fears he has become so anonymous that he no longer exists.
At his order, Pearza created the wisp-thin invisible devils to be indetectable agents. Now they are used as assassins, as are Corin's namesakes the Faceless. After his superiors in Nessus made the Faceless an independent order with its own leadership, perverting their original purpose, Corin is said to have gone into a rage, his hidden fortress in Nessus briefly appearing outlined in blue flame. Later on he had to move it to preserve his cherished security.
Zapan and Zimimar control the information that most baatezu have access to, each counterbalancing the other. Zapan aims for stability within Baatorian society, while Zimimar aims for nationalistic fervor and hatred of all enemies. Zimimar's gleeful rage balances Zapan's cloying reassurances.
Corin, on the other hand, controls the information that Zapan and Zimimar have access to. He believes this puts him in the most powerful position of all, though Zimimar and Zapan are inclined to disagree: it is the spin that is most important, not what Corin naively calls the facts.
Corin once dwelled in the cold wastes of Caina, serving then-Lord Nuriel who originally bore the Hellwinter (Nuriel is now merely a ragewind commanded by the current lord), and then the insectoid Rimmon who created from Nuriel's coldwraiths the prototypes of the gelugons with its frost cocoons. When Mephistopheles took over the layer, Corin went underground, waging a guerilla war against the new master. One of the Corins, at any rate: the pit fiends change, even then, but the mask remains the same. Once the chill visage lay dormant in the ice for fifty centuries before a pit fiend in Mephistopheles' service discovered it and the line began anew. The mask itself was carved from nevermelting ice by Nuriel himself as a reward for Corin's service. Corin found his employment under alien Rimmon to be unsatisfying, particularly as his role was slowly usurped by the proto-gelugons, but he fought as hard as any against the usurper Mephistopheles from Nessus, even when Rimmon was called to take Mephisto's place.
Ultimately Cantrum found Corin in the trackless wastes, far from any permanent landmark. Corin was plotting to become one with the glacier Nargus, transferring his consciousness to the mobile mountain of ice in order to capture Mephistopheles' citadel Mephistar. Cantrum convinced him to join the what he termed the Dark Nine instead. As a minister of Baator, he would again have the status he lost with the Lord of No Mercy's ascension, status he could use against Mephistopheles when the time was right.
Corin brought along his Faceless, those perfect terrorists he had stolen from Mephistopheles, freezing off their features and with it their prior identities. Later they were taken from him by Phongor, just the beginning of the friction between the two fiends.
Phongor, of course, was and is the Grand Inquisitor of Nessus, he of the million spies. When Corin took over as Spymaster of the Hells, Phongor's role became greatly limited as a mere chief justice; since then he has schemed to bring Corin down, despite the fact that Corin is theoretically his inferior.
Corin has been training successors, passing the mask on to them when he feels the time is right. The succession has been almost unbroken, but he has yet to shake off Phongor's influence. Phongor has won over many of Corin's spies and stolen his assassins - though the Faceless were in turn stolen from him by an order from higher still.
Corin, despite his vast intelligence network, has yet to successfully humiliate his hereditary enemies Phongor and Mephistopheles. He played a part in the elevation of Molikroth, much to his later chagrin when Molikroth's identiy was revealed. Phongor, too, seems unshakable, despite the mountains of incriminating evidence against him that Corin has forged. The greater hierarchs deeper in Malsheem seemed unimpressed.
The hierarchy goes deeper still, deeper and deeper in rooms and passages that even the majordomo Baalberith doesn't know. No pit fiend in Nessus knows how many layers of hierarchy lie between the Dark Eight and the ultimate Overlord. Each superior has superiors that only they answer to, darker and darker and deeper and deeper in seemingly infinite regression, the shadowed nobles getting older and stranger with each level.
Corin deals little with Rimmon, who still serves in its new role as a guardian of the wilds of Nessus. When they meet, a courteous bow is their only communication.
It is in dealing with the Blood War that Corin is most free. He dispatches his spies throughout the far corners of the planes, spying on the tanar'ri, yugoloths, and even celestials. Corin has been experimenting with the mathematics of chaos and madness, trying to see the planes through tanar'ric, slaadi, and celestial eyes. With every moment, it is impossible to say what may be looking through the eyeholes in his icy mask.
Since Cantrum's death, Corin is the most mysterious of the Eight, seldom communicating with the others. He stands (not sits) silently through the meetings, passing his communications using ice mephits that shatter after they have finished their tasks. In his private fortress there are thousands of such mephits caged in the catacombs beneath, designed to never reveal their secrets to anyone. Corin obsessively dictates his thoughts to them, preserving the views of the many faces beneath his mask, protecting them from even himself. Sometimes Corin will attempt to use spies to suss out his own secrets, hoping to discover by these means which of his faces is the real one.