Read Online Rebellion: Tainted Realm: Book 2 by Ian Irvine - Free Book Online Page B

walls of which were carved into scenes of forest glades – it was the main tunnel in the underground city, Cython. It wasn’t water either, for it was thick and red and sluggish, and had a smell like iron.
 
    “
Bare your throat,” said the chancellor’s principal healer, Madam Dibly, a scrawny old woman with a dowager’s hump.
    Tali was jerked out of her daze and the vision of that red flood vanished. “My –
throat
?”
    “To best preserve its potency, your healing blood has to be taken fast. And the carotid artery is the fastest.”
    “Why not take it directly from my heart?” Tali snapped. “That’d be even quicker.”
    The old healer’s pouched eyes double-blinked at her. “I don’t like the treacherous Pale, Thalalie vi Torgrist, and I don’t like you. It’s a great honour to serve your country this way. Why can’t you see that?”
    “I don’t see you giving up your life’s blood.”
    “If my blood had healing powers, I would do so gladly, but I can only heal with my hands.” Dibly studied her fingers. The knuckles were swollen and her fingers moved stiffly.
    “You’re not a healer, Madam
Dribbly
, you’re a butcher. Are you making blood pudding from my left-overs? If it heals so well, you could live forever on it.”
    “Bare. Your. Throat!”
    It wasn’t wise to make an enemy out of one so exalted, who was, in any case, following the orders of the chancellor. But Tali had to fight. Robbed of her friends, her quest, and the man she had only realised she loved when he had been condemned in front of her, resistance was all she had left. She didn’t even have the use of her magery. Afraid that Lyf would lock onto it and track her down, she had buried her gift so deeply that she could not find it again.
    It wasn’t right that Lyf, the man ultimately responsible for her mother’s death and the deaths of her other ancestors, was not only free, but stronger than ever. Yet Tali, even as a slave, had not been as powerless as she was now. One thing had not changed, however – her determination to escape and bring him to justice.
    Resistance was useless here. If she did not obey, Dibly would call her attendants and they would not be gentle. Tali took off her jacket and unfastened her high-collared blouse, her cold fingers fumbling with the buttons. She pulled it down over her shoulders, then lay back on the camp stretcher, shivering.
    The chancellor’s cavalcade had fled the ruins of Caulderon three days ago, using powerful magery to cover their tracks. Now they were high in the Crowbung Range, heading west, travelling at night by secret paths and hiding by day. It had been cold enough in Caulderon, but at this altitude winter was so bitter that everyone slept fully clothed. Tali had not bathed since they left, and itched all over. As a slave in Cython, she had bathed every day. Going without all this time was torment.
    Madam Dibly passed a broad strap across Tali’s forehead and pulled it tight.
    “What’s that for?” Tali cried.
    Straps were passed around both her arms, above the elbows, then Dibly waved a cannula, large enough to take blood from a whale, in Tali’s face. The slanted steel tip winked at her in the lantern light.
    “Were you to move or twitch with this deep in your throat,” the healer said with the ghoulish relish peculiar to her profession, “it might go ill for you.”
    “Not if you know your job,” Tali said coldly.
    “I do. That’s why I’m strapping you down. And if you curb your insolence I might even unstrap you afterwards.”
    The healer set a pyramid-shaped bottle, made from green glass, on the floor. It looked as though it would hold a quart. So much? Tali thought. Can I live if they take all that? Does the chancellor care if I don’t?
    Dibly crushed a head of garlic and rubbed the reeking pulp all over her palms and fingers to disinfect them. Tali’s stomach heaved. The smell reminded her of her years of slavery in the toadstool grottoes. One of the