The Silent Envoy

Precinct-Fortress Nine of the Adeptus Arbites had the lowest crime rate in Varanis Hive for twenty years running. It sat in the middle of the worst underhive district on the planet. The Arbites Lord Marshal was proud of it. The Inquisitor was not, once she read the numbers, because the numbers showed that nobody in the district had been arrested in four years. Crime had not fallen. It had stopped.

The precinct was commanded by Proctor Mael Idris, who was tall, pale and courteous, and who conducted the whole of the Inquisitor’s first interview without once speaking aloud. His adjutant spoke for him. The adjutant explained that the Proctor had lost his voice in a riot. The Proctor smiled, and nodded, and the Inquisitor noticed that everyone else in the room nodded too, at exactly the same moment.

The district’s population census showed births up by a third in a generation. The children of the district were quiet, well behaved, and did not have the right number of teeth.

The purge of Precinct-Fortress Nine took two days. The Inquisitor’s report on it is brief and states only that the Proctor was taken alive, that he spoke exactly once, in a voice nobody in the room could afterwards describe, and that the word he spoke was her own name, the one she was given as a child, which she has not used in a hundred years and which appears in no record.

The report also records that the Inquisitor’s own Interrogator, Sefa Quill, had been bitten during the first interview and had hidden it. The bite had not taken. The Interrogator was sanctioned for the concealment and not for the wound.

The district is empty now. The Arbites have moved the precinct to another part of the hive, and its crime rate is ordinary.