Martha Wells has been one of the more prolific speculative fiction writers of the last couple of decades. Her most popular series has been the Hugo-Award winning Murderbot Diaries, but before those books exploded, Martha was spinning tales along the fantasy branch of the Speculative Fiction tree. From her debut The Element of Fire to the Ile-Rien saga to the Raksura books (a personal favorite) she’s created many worlds and many characters. Now, having made a great impression in SF with the aforementioned Murderbot books, Martha Wells returns to epic fantasy with Witch King.
Kai-Enna is the Witch King, though he hasn’t always been, and he hasn’t even always been Kai-Enna!
After being murdered, his consciousness dormant and unaware of the passing of time while confined in an elaborate water trap, Kai wakes to find a lesser mage attempting to harness Kai’s magic to his own advantage. That was never going to go well.
But why was Kai imprisoned in the first place? What has changed in the world since his assassination? And why does the Rising World Coalition appear to be growing in influence?
Kai will need to pull his allies close and draw on all his pain magic if he is to answer even the least of these questions.
He’s not going to like the answers.
In Witch King, Wells drops readers directly into the action with less preamble than I provided for this review. Kai wakes up unawares, outside of his body. Kai is a demon who can switch bodies and at the start of the novel, Kai is awoken from a long-imprisoned slumber and is bodiless. The nature of Demons is such that they can take over the bodies of the recently deceased. He has little knowledge of what happened before he was murdered and much of his narrative in “the present” is focused on this mystery he’s trying to solve.
Told in the current time of Kai’s awakening, as well as the past when Kai was a young demon making friends and enemies, and the start of his alliance with Zaide who were imprisoned with him in the “current time.” The past timeline is something of a coming-of-age story for Kai as he overturns the rule Hierarchs, invaders from an unknown land. This allows for Wells to flex her world-building muscles. One element in particular was how demons are gender-fluid in the truest sense of the term, the enter bodies regardless of gender comfortably. Additionally, the gender dynamics are a matter-of-fact element throughout the novel, when Kai is woken along with Zaide, Zaide is searching for her missing wife.
That past, when Kai is a young demon, charts the takeover of his land by the Hierarchs which takes place about 60 years prior to the “present” of the novel. When he awakens in his aquatic prison, his memories are blocked due to the natural weakness demons have to water so much of the “present” is a story of discovery, both of who Kai is and how he arrived where we met him at the start of the novel. Because of the parallel storyline, Wells was able to build up tension two-fold. In the past, the mounting tension of Kai and his allies trying to defeat the Hierarchs, while also knowing that Kai will eventually be defeated is one flavor of tension. In the present, that tension is tied up with Kai trying to find and defeat his captors. The only time the tension waned for me was a little bit during the final third of the novel.
Kai is the center of the story and is intriguing on many levels. His demon nature, his fluidity of bodies, and his past history make him a character who carries the story. The view of the world in which Kai lives in is only what is necessary to the plot of the novel, but the details are interesting and enough that I’d like to see more of the world. In other words, Wells has two very important ingredients for the story playing well together and those elements are strong enough to carry other stories, should more tales in this world be planned. In some ways, while there is closure to the novel, it feels like it is just part of something larger.
© 2023 Rob H. Bedford
Hardcover | 432 pages
Tor.com Publishing | May 2023
Author Website: https://www.marthawells.com/ | Twitter: @MarthaWells1
Excerpt: https://www.tor.com/2023/04/24/excerpt-witch-king-by-martha-wells-the-beginning/
