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A demon in a dungeon
Feb. 20th, 2024 03:03 pmThis summer I picked up an ARC of Martha Wells’ newest non-Murderbot work, a 400-page fantasy novel called Witch King.
Our protagonist, Kai, is a demon who can inhabit the bodies of freshly dead mortals, and also who can kill people by sucking the life out of them via touch. Despite these grisly powers he is our good dude. As a baby demon Kai had pretty much just wanted to hang out in the Saredi grasslands with his adopted mortal family in the body of Enna, a teenage girl who had met with some kind of unexpected illness or accident (I don’t remember) and whose body had thus been gifted to Kai so that he could join the family. But then everything changedwhen the Fire Nation attacked when a group of impossibly powerful conquerors calling themselves the Hierarchs swept down from the south (the south is the top of the world in this universe), obliterating entire cities and installing puppet regimes in the ones they wanted to hang onto for a bit.
The book takes place mainly in two timelines: the “past” timeline, which is where Kai teams up with a satisfyingly ragtag bunch of other people who had been imprisoned by the Hierarchs to exact bloody vengeance and obliterate the Hierarchs and their pet expositors with extreme violence, and the “present,” which takes place a few human generation after the overthrow of the Hierarchs, where the Rising World coalition has solidified into the Rising World Empire and is having its own political intrigues. One of these intrigues resulted in Kai and his friend, a Witch named Zeide, being murdered/put into stasis and kept in an elaborate underground water trap tomb for about a year. Upon being ignominiously woken up by an expositor who had intended to magically enslave Kai and keep him as a familiar, Kai, Zeide, and their new street rat friend Sonja have to figure out how this happened. Solving his own murder leads Kai and friends to uncovering a whole conspiracy and also having to rescue Zeide’ wife Tahren. This is all a fun romp, for the epic fantasy definition of “romp” where people get exploded constantly.
The one bit that actually tripped me up was that I 100% expected Kai’s guess that he had been dead for about a year to be wildly off and when the resurfaced from his water tomb he’d find that he’d missed, like, 100 years, and have to catch up on a bunch of History. This is not actually where the plot went at all and I was nearly halfway through the book before I stopped waiting for that particular shoe to drop. So I was confused by my own overconfident genre-savvy, I guess.
Overall I do not think this is a book that particularly transcends the fantasy genre or that will change the game within the genre. However, it is a perfectly solid epic fantasy, with fun exotic worldbuilding and lots of big bloody action scenes and explosive magics and high-stakes intrigues. I enjoyed it a lot and will probably read the sequel when it comes out.
Our protagonist, Kai, is a demon who can inhabit the bodies of freshly dead mortals, and also who can kill people by sucking the life out of them via touch. Despite these grisly powers he is our good dude. As a baby demon Kai had pretty much just wanted to hang out in the Saredi grasslands with his adopted mortal family in the body of Enna, a teenage girl who had met with some kind of unexpected illness or accident (I don’t remember) and whose body had thus been gifted to Kai so that he could join the family. But then everything changed
The book takes place mainly in two timelines: the “past” timeline, which is where Kai teams up with a satisfyingly ragtag bunch of other people who had been imprisoned by the Hierarchs to exact bloody vengeance and obliterate the Hierarchs and their pet expositors with extreme violence, and the “present,” which takes place a few human generation after the overthrow of the Hierarchs, where the Rising World coalition has solidified into the Rising World Empire and is having its own political intrigues. One of these intrigues resulted in Kai and his friend, a Witch named Zeide, being murdered/put into stasis and kept in an elaborate underground water trap tomb for about a year. Upon being ignominiously woken up by an expositor who had intended to magically enslave Kai and keep him as a familiar, Kai, Zeide, and their new street rat friend Sonja have to figure out how this happened. Solving his own murder leads Kai and friends to uncovering a whole conspiracy and also having to rescue Zeide’ wife Tahren. This is all a fun romp, for the epic fantasy definition of “romp” where people get exploded constantly.
The one bit that actually tripped me up was that I 100% expected Kai’s guess that he had been dead for about a year to be wildly off and when the resurfaced from his water tomb he’d find that he’d missed, like, 100 years, and have to catch up on a bunch of History. This is not actually where the plot went at all and I was nearly halfway through the book before I stopped waiting for that particular shoe to drop. So I was confused by my own overconfident genre-savvy, I guess.
Overall I do not think this is a book that particularly transcends the fantasy genre or that will change the game within the genre. However, it is a perfectly solid epic fantasy, with fun exotic worldbuilding and lots of big bloody action scenes and explosive magics and high-stakes intrigues. I enjoyed it a lot and will probably read the sequel when it comes out.