I’ve been loving Martha Wells’s Murderbot books and anxiously awaiting the next installment, so when my dad said he was reading a fantasy by Martha Wells called Witch King, you know I had to jump on that bandwagon!
Normally, I would just take my dad’s copy of the book, but my dad read this one on his Kindle, and I didn’t want to steal his whole Kindle. That left me to either buy my own copy or get it from my library. Fortunately, my library has the audiobook, so I got to listen to this one.
Listening to this one might have been a mistake because Wells is building a very large world with references to all kinds of people and their abilities, not to mention flipping back and forth in time and referencing things that happened even before the earlier timeline of this book. So, I’ll try my best to sum up this book, but in addition to leaving out some things for the sake of time, I’m also sure to forget a whole bunch of stuff.
So, the “witch king” is not actually a witch or a king. He’s a demon who inhabits the bodies of humans who have died. His name is Kaiisteron, and when Kai inhabits a body, he can’t be killed, but water does make him weaker. When we first meet him, he’s waking up after having been trapped under water for about a year. Some foolish humans come to try and make him their familiar, which is a huge mistake. As soon as he’s free of the water and awake, he takes control of the corpse they brought into the room with him, because apparently that person died recently enough that Kai can still inhabit their body. So he does, and proceeds to kill the two men who meant to make him their familiar.
Kai kills people by touching them and drawing out their life force, which he then feeds on. It doesn’t happen every time he touches someone, but he does have to be touching them for it to work. People who don’t understand how it works fear him and act as though just being near him or making eye contact with him is enough, and Kai is not above using that fear to his advantage when it suits his purposes.
The mages Kai killed had brought a girl with them in case Kai didn’t take to the first body, and since she has nowhere else to go, Kai kind of ends up adopting her.
The first thing Kai does is seek out his friend, Ziede. Fortunately, Ziede has a pearl embedded in her heart that connects her to Kai, which means they can communicate telepathically. Unfortunately, Ziede is not entirely sure where she is, much less where she is in relation to wherever Kai is right now.
So Kai and his new human friend head out to track down Ziede, which they do fairly quickly. Next they have to figure out where they are (on an island), how long they were unconscious (about a year), who trapped them there and why, and where is Ziede’s wife?
Despite the fact that Kai is called the Witch King, I think Ziede is the one who’s a witch. Her main power involves convincing wind devils to do her bidding, which is super useful. They do a lot of sailing in this book, and she’s able to summon wind devils to fill the sails for them. When flying is the best way to get from Point A to Point B, she can summon wind devils to carry her and her friends where they need to go. At one point, Kai watches the reaction of another character to see if he panics when this happens. He does not, but I’m pretty sure I would have.
Basically, they decide their best shot at finding Ziede’s wife is to use a finding stone. First, they have to find the finding stone. Fortunately, even though Kai is shut off from the underrealm, he’s still able to kind of project himself down there and get some help from his grandma. Then he stumbles upon his friend and Ziede’s brother-in-law, who just happens to know where the finding stone is, and is able to take them there.
Along the way, we keep getting well-timed flashbacks to some of Kai’s adventures in a different body. We learn how they met Ziede’s wife, we get a sense of the relationship between Kai and Ziede’s brother-in-law, as well as some of the history of the area. I won’t go into details (mostly because I can’t remember details) but I did manage to figure out that the “Big Bad” they were fighting was imperialism and colonialism. The Hierarchs are the Big Bad who came from a distant land one day, took over, and imprisoned all the demons they could find. Someone working against them managed to free Kai and convince him to help them break out. It was supposed to be a suicide mission, but it ends up going better than they had planned.
Flashforward to the current timeline and Ziede’s brother-in-law thinks there’s a chance the Hierarchs could come back. Kai is terrified at the thought and his friend quickly tries to backtrack, saying it’s not going to happen today, or soon, or maybe ever. Just that it could happen.
Nevertheless, while Kai and his friends do accomplish their mission for this book (including figuring out who betrayed them, but it’s cool because Kai betrayed him first), there is definitely the opportunity to do a lot more with these characters. Wells has said she is working on a sequel, and honestly, I’ll probably have to reread Witch King before reading any sequels, not only to refresh my memory, but to gain a better grasp on what the heck is going on in this book.
I have seen some other reviews where people said they also had a hard time following everything in this book. It made me feel better to know I wasn’t the only one who had a hard time following along.