An Unclean Strength (The Skin Walker War Book 2) by Michael McClung

Author:Michael McClung [McClung, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

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When she left the numen’s chamber, they still knelt, moving not a muscle. She intended to go straight to her chamber, to strip the filthy dress from her body and bathe, but she discovered that an unseasonably cold rain had begun to fall while she had been making her example. So instead she walked out of Thunderhead, and into the unclean mist and cleansing, cooling rain. As always, her coterie of half-dead, half-killed, utterly biddable slaves trailed her, by now unnoticed.

She wandered for a long time, aimlessly, letting her anger cool and letting the rain wash clean, to the extent possible, all the gore. Anger had only limited use, and serious drawbacks, or so sister Nimrun had taught her. Anya found that to be true. She’d killed the first out of anger, but she still would have done it if she’d felt nothing but vague pique, or nothing at all. Such a direct threat to her command could not be allowed, or her control of the creatures, and her plan, would have evaporated.

She had used the numen to be sure of the thing’s demise, for a skin walker was notoriously, historically hard to permanently kill… which was exactly why Andos’s single-handed slaughter of eleven of them in a single battle, though it had cost him his own life, had become such a legend, and given birth to an entire religious order.

Unbidden, a memory rose up – of brother Caida carrying her through the slaughtered armsmen he had heaped at her door, to keep her from harm. He had been sheeted in blood, much as she had just been only a short time before. There had been no gentle spring rain, then, to wash him clean.

A coppery taste filled her mouth, and she realized she had been biting the inside of her cheek.

Anya turned her thoughts away from Andines.

She had almost – almost – lost her self-control, and prematurely begun the purge of the skin walkers that she knew must inevitably happen. That would have been a mistake, for several reasons. First, there was no guarantee she would have come out the victor. Heirus and the nine remaining captains certainly wouldn’t have kept still and let her execute them one by one. Second, discarding the skin walkers at this juncture would seriously disrupt plans that were already in motion. Third, she would not have gotten them all; there was at least one more, in Roumney, preparing to take the reins of power in that country. If it hadn’t already.

She doubted it would approve of her executing its kin. Making an enemy of a creature that knew a considerable portion of her plans and had control of an army would have been a serious blunder.

She also doubted it was the only other skin walker at large in the world.

As what light there was began to flee the mist-shrouded sky, she remembered one other thing sister Nimrun had told her about anger: that it often masks fear.

She began the walk back

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