“… This Herman Orff has a simple appearance. Quite small, baldish,
lean – forty years of age, looks sixty. He has none of that arrogance
that is usually a recognizable feature of all governmental inquisitors.
They say he is not a man of great physical strength and that is
quite a rarity for universal emissaries that are our inquisitors…”
“…Despite the tradition, Orff never used any methods of direct
influence. He never hides and never pretends to be someone else.
Always goes straight to the point. He restored the ancient methods,
such as interrogation and preliminary investigation. No secret
techniques, no tricks. It seems that he is purposefully breaking
the rumors about inquisitors’ inexplicable powers, which usually
spread around a city and get in the way of investigation, no matter
how right those rumors might be…”
“…Please pay special attention to Herman Orff’s methods. We are
not speaking of a mission of delicate nature; we have a global
crisis, which has included impressive masses of the population.
Such crisis cannot be resolved by means of diversion, spying,
psychological influence and diplomacy. To prevent a revolt before
it even starts, so that the rebels find that the reasons for the
uprise are no longer present before they can even make any steps
– that is a political matter. Here we have to solve an equation
with dozens of functions…”
As an opposition to Phylin or Mark Karminskiy, whose methods
of handling massive crises were also effective, Orff never took
to useless cruelty. An inquisitor always causes fear. Obviously
Orff was feared as well, but when playing a game Orff always set
all his cards on the table and always won. He was the teacher
of such radical inquisitors as Sagatka, Kurin and Aglaya Lylich.
It is interesting to note that all of them were executed on the
Committee’s command, the reason for that being their inclination
for display of initiative. Behind the directness of their methods
they hid some game of their own, for their personal profit, which
they had been playing without the knowledge of the Authorities.
* Inquisitor (governmental inquisitor) – in
this case the word has nothing to do with the church. Inquisitors
are people of a restricted group of specialists (their numbers
at different times varied from 19 to 52), for whom the Authorities
would assign tasks of extraordinary nature. The thing is that
inquisitors had a mysterious gift – they could solve a problem
that appeared to have no solution. Unique knowledge, techniques
and skills, as well as most profound erudition were accompanied
by temporary autocracy that was granted to them by the Authorities.
When on a mission, the inquisitor was never restricted by any
laws except for the ones he made himself.
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