Random Reading: Witch King by Martha Wells

A being called Kai wakes up to find himself in a glass box, feeling terrible. His mental powers confirm that a dear friend is somewhere near, but she's feeling equally out of it. Then a gang of unsavory characters show up, dragging with them a dead body and a struggling prisoner. With an ease that shows he's done this many times before, Kai transfers himself into the dead body.

Wait, what?

In less than five minutes, the little band of evildoers discover that they are facing not the helpless ensorcelled person that they had expected, but a fully functioning and extremely pissed off major demon:

"Now," Kai said, grinning, as he shoved the veil aside. "Which one of you wants to go first?"

This is not the Wells of Murderbot, with relatively straightforward plots and a narrator with a limited interest in the worldbuilding around it, but instead the Wells of the Fall of Ile-Rien and Books of the Raksura, with rich, multi-layered histories and landscapes. Some readers may be disappointed; I was enthralled.

After a series of brief action-filled set pieces in which Kai, his friend Ziede, and the former prisoner (who turns out to be a street urchin named Sanja) escape the islet tomb/tower in which the two adults were imprisoned, the book starts to alternate the current timeline plot, in which Kai and Ziede start to unravel the mystery of who imprisoned them and why, with sections set in Kai's past, where we find out more about what he is and what he cares about.

( Cut for more, including some spoilers )

I really liked this book, but then, I trust Wells to tell a story that I will enjoy, and she seems to be as addicted to the Family of Choice trope as I am.

Witch King has drawn an extremely mixed bag of reviews. Part of it is likely due to the fact that readers are thrown into the deep end and expected to figure out this swimming thing themselves. Not everyone likes this approach. What info dumps we do get are brief, basic, and simply told because they are most often directed in-story at young Sanja, who seems to be nine or ten years old.

Another complaint is that except for Kai, we don't get inside anyone's head. This is actually a common Wells characteristic: the sole narrator of Books of the Raksura is Moon, and the sole narrator of the Murderbot Diaries is, of course, Murderbot/SecUnit. (The Fall of Ile-Rien is a little different: we definitely get sections from both Tremaine and Ilias' viewpoints, and I think we get some from Florian in the second and third books.) Again, this isn't something that bothers me.

On the positive side, people have noted with pleasure the fact that much of the story is agendered. Kai's only concerns about the bodies he has inhabited are how useful they are: some bodies require more rest, some need more food to function well, and so on. Gender isn't an issue. Ziede and her wife Tahren are both women, and various members of the supporting cast use they pronouns.

The ending is fairly open: some of the mysteries are solved, but there is plenty of "Yes, but what about …?" to feed into a sequel or sequels. And when I went to move the ebook from my actual Kindle device to the app on my iPad for another re-read (this will be re-read number 3) , I noticed that the current title info says Witch King (The Rising World Book 1). 😃