A ghost of a smile appeared on her face for a moment before it sunk back into the wretched depths of her face.
"You remembered," she said.
"It is quite hard to forget. I would make you a cup of tea almost every morning while we had breakfast, and it would always be the same. Lots of tea, no sugar, and just a dash of milk."
That ghost of a smile appeared again for a fraction of a second. "There truly has been no one that has been able to make a sufficient cup of tea quite like you, James Treborn. Many have tried, but none have succeeded."
"How do you take yours?" James asked me.
"White and sweet," I said. "I'm more of a coffee drinker than a tea drinker, but sometimes tea really does hit the spot."
"White and two, then. Same as me," James said.
Sister Margaret took a cup and saucer from the table and lifted the cup to her lips with her pinkie extended. The saucer hovered an inch or two below the base of the cup. She took a sip and made a satisfied sound.
"So, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit? I get the feeling that you're not just here for tea," she said.
"Yes," James agreed. He took a sip of his own tea before continuing. "Ahh, I forgot how good the tea in the orphanage tasted. When you get this from?"
"Atavashia. The eastern provinces grow the most splendid tea," Sister Margaret said.
"Expensive stuff. The orphanage must be doing well for itself."
"Only enough to keep our heads above water," Sister Margaret said.
"You're right. I'm not just here for the tea. I know you keep tabs on all of the children that were raised here in the Allurian orphanage so it should come as no surprise to you that I'm working for Langdon Specialist Investigations."
"That's right. It is no surprise," she agreed.
"A case came across my desk this morning of a missing child. One of your children to be more precise."
"My boy, you know better than anyone else that no one is ever kept here in the Allurian orphanage against their will. Children are free to come and go as they wish. We have runaways constantly. We don't try to stop them leaving, in fact, we encourage it. The more beds we have available here in the orphanage, the more places there are for children to come who have nowhere else to go."
James chuckled dryly. "This case came from inside the orphanage. A young boy locked in one of your cells, the ones down in the basement, somehow disappeared. The room was locked and yet still the child managed to escape. I don't know who raised this job with Langdon Specialist Investigations, but now the case has come across my desk I have a personal stake in finding this boy."
"You have no personal stake in anything to do with the orphanage anymore James Treborn. The moment you decided to leave, you turned your back on us."
"We can go over all the old ground all day if you like, Sister Margaret. I left the orphanage because I wanted to actually do good in the world, and not just do good for the orphanage. You preached about the evils of the world, and yet did nothing else to solve them. I could not sit idly by. I have a feeling that you still have trouble distinguishing between preaching about the good of the world and taking action to make it happen."
I took a sip of my tea. It was delicious. Despite the complexity of all the other systems around me in Crematoria Online that made this world function, I was most impressed by how much they were able to make food taste like food.
James and Sister Margaret were quiet for a moment as they exchanged knowing looks across the table.
"Look at you," Sister Margaret said finally, with an actual smile on her face. "You did listen."
"Is there a chance that he is still alive?" James asked, ignoring sentiment.
Sister Margaret considered this for a moment. The smile died on her lips. "There is always a chance."
"Tell me about the boy," James said. "Tell me about John Byrne."
"He came to us in the same way they all do. John had nowhere else to go. We were the last safe house that would take him in. He was only seven years old when he came to us, but he had been running odd jobs on the streets of Eldin for two years already. Which meant that when he came to the orphanage, he already knew who the key players in Eldin's underbelly were. As you know, the orphanage has many connections with all levels of Eldin's institutions. We saw an opportunity to be able to make use of the connections that John brought with him."
"What exactly is it the orphanage had him do?" I asked.
"John was a troublemaker. It wasn't just the connections he made while he was working on streets. He learned that everyone needed a side hustle. So, while he was acting as our intermediary, he decided to steal something from someone whom nothing should ever be stolen. It was a very unfortunate circumstance. One in which we, the orphanage, had no choice but to ensure that his punishment matched his crimes."
"If I remember correctly, back to my time here in the orphanage, sometimes stealing a little bit off the side was encouraged by the sisters. Are you sure this wasn't something that one of the sisters had asked John to do? Perhaps he was just unlucky in getting caught."
Sister Margaret shook her head from side to side in disagreement. "No," she said. "This was not someone who we would ever steal from."
"Who was it?" James asked.
"That information is not necessary at this point. I worked very hard to ensure this relationship remains on good terms. I will not risk that just because someone from Langdon Specialist Investigations wants to know."
"I have a short list of who it might have been," James said. "We'll come back to that if we need to. What we need to know right now is this: the orphanage decided to punish young John Byrne because he stole something. The person that John stole something from was someone who had an important relationship with the orphanage. Someone who needed to know that appropriate punitive measures would be taken so the child wouldn't do it again. How does that sound?"
"That sounds accurate," Sister Margaret said.
"But here's what I don't understand," James said. "Why wouldn't this person simply take their own revenge on the boy? What's stopping them from stealing John out from under your nose as revenge for the slight?"
"No, that is preposterous. That would not have happened," Sister Margaret said.
"Do you really expect us to believe that?" I asked.
"The offer was made, and the party declined!" Sister Margaret hissed through clenched teeth.
"What offer?" I asked.
"We offered the child, and they refused."
My blood ran cold. Sister Margaret had offered John Byrne's life to whoever it was that he slighted. She was ready to sacrifice a child's life to protect the orphanage.
"They declined! Thank the Celestials. I don't know if I could have lived with myself if they had accepted," she continued. "They simply told us that we were to ensure that he learned his lesson. So we locked John up as penance for his crimes, and that's when he disappeared."
I was starting to get a very bad feeling about this. The deeper we decided to dig, the darker the secrets became. Not only was the orphanage offering young children a place to stay, but they were also using them for their own ends. They were involving them in what sounded like organized crime, and Sister Margaret at the very least had no qualms about offering a child's life to whoever it was they were in business with.
I activated my Persuade ability. My concentration meter dropped by 25%, just as I expected it would. I decided to try and push this conversation a little further.
"Sister Margaret, I am a rather new arrival to Eldin, and I understand that you and James have a history. But what seems most readily apparent to me is that you care deeply about the children that you take care of here. Isn't that right? Why would you let someone kill a kid?" I asked.
"Of course, we care about the children! We care about them more than anything else! Sometimes the only way to pay is with blood," Sister Margaret said.
A notification appeared in the bottom of my view.
Your Persuasion seco
ndary attribute has increased!
All right. Little by little, I was leveling up the core skills I'd need to use as an Investigator.
"Then how is it that you were able to offer the life of one of the children under your care?"
"They are our number one priority! They all are! Do you know how much it costs to run an orphanage like this and take care of the hundreds of children that we have here? Of course, you don't. We get no funding from the Emperor, despite his wars making orphans that we raise! We receive meager donations from rich benefactors. But when it comes to the day-to-day running of the orphanage it's up to us. If we don't have enough gold in our treasury to pay for food, then our children starve. They go without wood to burn in the winter. They go without warm clothes. If we can't afford to buy the right medicine, we can't heal them when they are sick. You may not have seen what the sisters did for you when you were a child James, but is the harsh reality that we live in. Sacrificing one life to save ten is sometimes the only choices we have left."
James sighed. "Evil is evil, as far as I'm concerned. Justify it however you want, it still boils down to the same thing. That's why I got out when I did. The orphanage taught me the most important lesson of all. We all have a choice, and those who choose to stand by and do nothing are just as complicit as those who perpetrate the crime."
Sister Margaret said nothing to that. She just took another sip of her tea.
"Can you show us the cell that John was locked in?" I asked.
Sister Margaret hesitated. She looked from me to James and back again.
"We may find something that will help us find the boy," James said.
I activated Persuade again. "You do want to find him, don't you? Help us help the boy." I said.
"Of course, we want to find him," Sister Margaret said as she placed the cup and the saucer back down on a finely crocheted doily. "Fine. Follow me, and please put your empty cups and saucers on the doilies. The table is quite old."
I placed my cup and saucer down on a yellow crocheted doily that reminded me of a sunflower. My mother used to crochet things like this all the time, back when she was still around. A sudden pang of grief rushed over me as a memory of her crocheting a thick scarf for Winter flooded my mind. She was sitting cross-legged on the ratty old mattress on our bed. She hummed an old tune to herself as she wove rough-spun yarn into a scarf to keep me warm. The memory dissipated as quickly as it arrived.
James put his cup and saucer on the bare wood of the table. He deliberately made eye contact with Sister Margaret as he did so. Her lips grew tighter as she saw him do it, but she said nothing.
We followed her out of the sitting room and into the orphanage. We headed deeper, then took a turn into a cramped hallway. It ended in a wooden door. The white paint was chipped and flaking away. Sister Margaret took a key from her belt and unlocked the door. A long staircase awaited us, leading down into the darkness beneath the Allurian Orphanage.
Chapter Fourteen
The Empty Room
We were descending into a crypt. The ground level of the orphanage was almost hospital-like in its cleanliness. As we descended the stairs down underneath the orphanage, however, things felt far different.
Torches burned in sconces on the sides of the hallway as we continued down. As we reached the bottom, I saw that long hallways extended into the distance in both directions. The flickering torchlight caused light and shadow to dance across the uneven stone bricks that made the walls. It was difficult to judge just what lay beyond the edges of those dancing shadows.
Sister Margaret headed left, seemingly unaffected by the dark and claustrophobic atmosphere that surrounded us. James didn't seem to mind either. He kept in step with Sister Margaret as she continued, and I had the feeling that this wasn't the first time that James had been down here. There was an earthy smell hanging in the air, no doubt coming from the moss growing between the cracks of the stone walls.
We continued for some time, taking a turn to the right, then a turn to the left, and by the time we had made two or three more turns I was completely and utterly lost. These halls were labyrinthine, and on both sides there were countless heavy wooden doors. Some were open, and others were locked with thick iron chains. Soon we came to a stop outside of a small room with a lock sealing it shut.
"This is where we kept the boy. This is the room that he was in, until he wasn't anymore," Sister Margaret said.
There was a heavy iron padlock hanging from the door latch. There was also a small steel panel that could slide to the side so the sisters would be able to talk to whoever was in the cell beyond. Inlaid into the bottom of the door, there was a small rectangular opening, which would have been for sliding food into the cell so the occupant could eat.
"You left the boy down here in the cold and the dark?" James asked.
"The agreement was that the punishment would match the crime," Sister Margaret said.
James shook his head sadly.
"Open the door," I said.
"Is that entirely necessary?" Sister Margaret asked.
I activated my Persuade ability again. The more I used it, the stronger it would grow.
"If we're going to get to the bottom of what happened here, yeah. We're going to need to look at what happened in the room," I said.
"Very well." Sister Margaret said with a sigh.
Another notification appeared, telling me that my Persuasion score had increased again. It didn't give me a score though, so I made a mental note to check that later.
Sister Margaret took a keyring from her belt, chose a key, and tried it in the lock. She made a disapproving sound as the lock refused to open. She tried another. This time the key turned. The lock clicked and sprung open. Sister Margaret swung the door inward.
"We haven't touched the room since the boy disappeared," she said. "We've been making our own investigations about exactly what happened, and how young John disappeared. So far, we have only been able to conclude that the impossible has happened. Somehow from within this locked room, a young boy has disappeared."
"Have you checked all of the adjacent cells?" James asked. "Is it possible that somehow the bricks have come loose, perhaps allowing him to travel from one cell to the next?"
"Yes, we checked. There is absolutely no way that the boy left the cell through any of the walls," Sister Margaret said.
"Is there any chance that one of the sisters might have let John out early?" I asked.
"No one would be that stupid," Sister Margaret said.
I activated my Persuade ability again. My concentration meter dropped by 25% and now sat at 54%. Using it twice in quick succession had drained my Concentration Points quickly, but out of combat they regenerated pretty quickly too.
"You need to tell us who you're afraid of," I said. "How will we be able to help the boy, and bring him back to the orphanage, if we don't know who he crossed?"
Sister Margaret sighed.
"He stole something from the Rat King," she said.
Another notification popped up, showing that my Persuasion score had increased again. Damn. This was easy! Although, I reminded myself that I was just starting out. Normally skills like this had a pretty serious growth curve. Still, I felt a little thrill knowing that I was just a little bit more persuasive that I had been just a moment ago.
James laughed. "You let a child deal with the Rat King? I always knew that you sisters were stupid, but I didn't realize you were that stupid."
"The Rat King and the orphanage have a long and prosperous agreement," Sister Margaret said, indignant. "We benefit each other, and most of our children understand that positive relationship. Unfortunately, John decided that he was going to risk that relationship by choosing to steal from someone who should not be stolen from."
"Hold up a second, you'll need to explain to me exactly who this Rat King person is," I said.
"He is the one who runs the world below the streets of Eldin," James said. "Emperor Darius Erodwulf and the Empire may ha
ve authority over most of what happens above ground, but the Rat King is the person with all the power under the streets." James turned to Sister Margaret. "Are you absolutely sure that the Rat King did not seek vengeance upon the boy?"
"His emissaries were very clear. The boy was to learn a lesson, but he was not to be harmed. If the Rat King is responsible for what happened to John, then he would have broken his word for the first time in history," Sister Margaret said. "I don't see that happening. Do you?"
"No. I don't see that happening," James said.
"If we're absolutely sure that the Rat King isn't a suspect, then perhaps we should start looking for clues left behind in the room," I said.
James nodded. "Sister, would you give us some privacy?"
"Of course," she replied. "Some of the sisters seemed rather superstitious of the cell ever since John disappeared. Like they feared it."
James turned back to Sister Margaret and held out his hand. "Leave that padlock and key with us."
"I don't think that's appropriate," Sister Margaret said.
"If there's any chance that we're going to get to the bottom of what happened here, Sister Margaret, there has to be a little bit of trust between us. I trust that the sisters of the orphanage had nothing to do with the disappearance of John Byrne and that you are only concerned with ensuring his good health, simply because we were asked to investigate. If the orphanage was behind this disappearance, it would have been buried. You will trust my associate and I that we are here in the best interests of the child as well. You will leave that lock with us, and you will leave the key with us."
It sounded suspiciously like James was using some kind of Persuade ability himself!
Sister Margaret considered his words for a moment before relenting. She fished the keys out of her pocket, removed the right one from the key ring, then handed both the key and the padlock to James. James slipped both items into the pocket of his suit jacket, then nodded.
"Thank you, Sister Margaret. Leave us be, and we will come to find you once we have found something that might lead us to an answer." James said.
Rise of the Crimson Order: A Crematoria Online LitRPG Novel Page 11
