Free Rebellion: Tainted Realm: Book 2 by Ian Irvine

most common toadstools grown there had smelled powerfully of garlic.
    The collapsed vessel of a boar’s artery ran from the cannula to the bottle. Madam Dibly inspected the point of the cannula and wiped Tali’s throat with a paste of crushed garlic and rosemary. She could feel her pulse ticking there.
    Why did her blood heal? Was it because she was Pale and had spent her whole life in Cython? If so, her healing blood was not rare at all – all eighty-five thousand Pale could share it. Or was there more to it? Did it have anything to do with the master pearl in her head? The missing fifth ebony pearl that everyone wanted so desperately?
    “Steady now,” said Dibly.
    The cannula looked like a harpoon. The old healer’s snaggly teeth were bared, yet there was a twinkle in her colourless eyes that Tali did not like at all. She was taking far too much pleasure in what she was about to do.
    “W-will it hurt?” said Tali.
    “My patients never stop whining and squealing, but it isn’t
real
pain.”
    “Why don’t we swap places?” said Tali. “You bare your grimy, wattled old neck and I’ll stab the cannula into it up to the hilt, and we’ll see how pig-like your squeals are.”
    Madam Dibly ground her yellow teeth, then in a single, precise movement thrust the cannula through Tali’s carotid artery and down it for a good three inches.
    Tali screamed. It felt as though her throat had been penetrated by a spike of glacial ice. For some seconds her blood seemed to stop flowing, as if it had frozen solid. Then it resumed, though it all appeared to be flowing down the boar’s artery, dilating it and colouring it scarlet, then pouring into the green glass bottle.
    It was already an inch deep. The watching healer separated into two fuzzy images and Tali’s head seemed to be revolving independently of her body, a sickening feeling that made her worry about throwing up. What would happen if she did while that great hollow spike ran down her artery? Would it tear out the other side? Not even Dibly could save her then.
    Tali’s vision blurred until all she could see was a uniform brown. Her senses disconnected save for the freezing feeling in her neck and a
tick, tick, tick
as her lifeblood drained away —
    The brownness was blown into banners like smog before the wind and she saw him. Her enemy, Lyf! She shivered. He was feeling in a crevice in the wall. She cried out, involuntarily, for he was in a chamber that looked eerily like the cellar where her eight-year-old self had seen her mother murdered for her ebony pearl. It had the same half-domed shape, not unlike a skull
…
 
    It
was
the murder cellar, though everything had been removed and every surface scrubbed back to expose the bare stone of the ceiling and walls. Before being profaned by treachery and murder, this chamber had been one of the oldest and most sacred places in ancient Cythe – the private temple of the kings.
    What was Lyf doing? He was alone save for a group of greybeard ghosts – Tali recognised some of them from the ancestor’s gallery he had created long ago in the wrythen’s caverns. Lyf had a furtive air, lifting stones up and putting them down, then checking over his shoulder as though afraid he was being watched.
 
    “Hurry!” said a spectre so ancient that he had faded to a transparent wisp, though his voice was strong and urgent. “The key must be found. Without it, all you’ve done is for nothing.”
 
    What key? What could be so vital that without it everything Lyf had done – saving his people and capturing the great city at the heart of Hightspall – was as nothing? And who was this ancient spectre who was telling the king what to do?
 
    The blood-loss vision faded and she saw nothing more.
     
    “You shouldn’t bait her, Tali. Madam Dibly is just doing what I ordered her to do.”
    Tali was so weak that she could not open her eyes, but she recognised the voice coming from the folding chair beside the camp bed. The