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Book: Witch King by Martha Wells

Published: 2023

ISBN: 978-1250826794

Martha Wells is perhaps best known for The Murderbot Diaries, a series of sci-fi stories about a misanthropic cyborg “security unit” that hacks its own internal governor so that it can watch soap operas inside its own head. Those stories are really fun and I recommend them.

Most recently, in 2023, her new fantasy novel Witch King was released. After a long wait in the hold queue at our local library, I was able to get a copy and read it.

Warning: some minor spoilers follow.

Witch King is about a demon named Kaiisteron, or Kai. Kai and many of his fellow demons live peacefully within tribes of nomads, inhabiting some of the bodies of their dead. But everything changes when the Fire Nation Hierarchs attack. Wielding powerful magic, the Hierarchs take over much of the world, killing many and enslaving others. Many demons, including Kai, are captured and imprisoned. A charismatic mortal, held as a hostage by the Hierarchs, hatches a daring plan to escape or at least achieve some small revenge in the attempt. The plan involves freeing Kaiisteron and the other imprisoned demons, and then killing some powerful Hierarch magicians. It doesn't go all to plan, but works out in a surprising way, resulting in, essentially a revolution and overthrow of the Hierarchs.

The book actually opens many years after all of that history, and explains it in bits and pieces with “flashback” chapters interspersed throughout the “present day” narrative. In the present day, an older, and more jaded/bitter (for reasons that become clear in the flashback chapters) Kaiisteron is again imprisoned as part of a nefarious plot, seemingly an attempt against a post-Hierarchs-overthrow coalition of nations called “The Rising World.” It turns out that Kai's latest captors are woefully unprepared to deal with him and he quickly escapes using magic fueled literally by the deaths of his enemies and his own pain 🤘. However, trouble is in close pursuit. Kai frees one of his close friends, the witch Ziede, who was also imprisoned. Ziede and Kai quickly discover, through magical means, that Ziede's wife Tahren is also missing. They set out on a quest to find Tahren and search for answers as to who is behind it and what their motives are.

Overall, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. The conclusion was very satisfying to me. The reason behind the plot to imprison Kai and his friends becomes clear and it was a bit of a surprise to me. But like all the best surprises, it makes sense in retrospect. A lot of the history/context provided throughout the book in the “flashback” chapters is related to this conclusion/payoff. I enjoyed Kaiisteron as a character and he had a lot of cool moments using his supernatural abilities. The magic and the worldbuilding is very good. Wells throws you into the deep end right away, and you'll have to pick up almost everything through context. There's not a lot of spoon-fed exposition in this book. There is tons of backround that was only hinted at and that seemed very delicious. I'd love to learn more about this world.

One thing that was difficult for me was keeping track of names. I don't know why, but between the present day and flashback chapters I had a hard time keeping track of some of the cast. I also had a bit of trouble remembering which was which of some of the nations, cities, and organizations, as well as how they related. This was made a bit more difficult by the fact that some of the allegiances change between the flashbacks and the present day chapters. I think this is a fairly minor gripe, and likely mostly my fault for not reading this book faster. I think I lost some context in between reading sessions.

Ultimately, as I think the dust jacket mentions, the book is about revolutions and how they can be fragile, requiring lots of different people to work together. Kai and his friends are in many ways an unlikely group of allies, and some of the people who you'd think would be closest to Kai are, well, not.

A solid book. I recommend it.