Witch King is a 2023 fantasy novel by Martha Wells.
Not long ago, barely a mortal lifetime, the known world was conquered by the Hierarchs: mages as powerful as their origins are mysterious, who destroyed entire civilizations and changed the course of history forever before their defeat.
Now Kaiisteron, Prince of the Fourth House of the Underearth, has woken up dead in a waterlogged tomb with no memory as to how he got there. But Kai is a life-devouring demon, able to possess the corpses of freshly dead mortals, and lucky for him, there happens to be a convenient corpse nearby. Less fortunately, there's also a necromantic "Expositor" and his entourage nearby, and it seems they've woken him up from his year-long death to try and bind him to do their bidding.
Thus begins Witch King. Now Kai, along with his also mysteriously-imprisoned friend, the witch Ziede, must find out who put them in that tomb, why, and what's happened to Ziede's wife Tahren in their absence.
Interspersed between the current day mystery are scenes from the past, explaining where Kai came from, how he, Ziede, Tahren, and Tahren's brother Dahin met, his introduction to the great Bashasa, and the beginning of the Hierarchs' fall.
Witch King provides examples of:
- Ability Mixing: Kai can use his own pain to fuel some of his magic, and his demonic Healing Factor trivializes most physical injuries, giving him a huge advantage over mortal Expositors.
- All for Nothing: Ramad is crushed to realize that Kai foiled Bashat's plans to become Emperor years before Bashat ever moved against Kai, making Bashat's betrayal of Kai an utter waste.
- Back from the Dead: Kai's ability as a demon is to possess corpses. The book opens with Kai's spirit hovering around his old corpse, then possessing a body nearby.
- Bait the Dog: When Kai possesses his newest body and sees its last memories, he sees that one of the man's kidnappers acted friendly at first just to make the betrayal hurt that much more. Kai makes a point of tearing that kidnapper's soul out.
- Been There, Shaped History: Kai, Ziede, Dahin, and Tahren are all far older than any humans they encounter, and they were all present during the war that eliminated the Hierarchs' rule and founded the Rising World Coalition Council. Ramad the historian is constantly trying to get information from Kai about the past and the heroic founder of the Coalition, Bashasa. When the group needs to travel to the Summer Halls, the flooded ruins of a city once owned by the Hierarchs, we are treated to this exchange:Ramad: So the interior really is flooded, the way the stories say?
Ziede: Oh, it's flooded all right. Kai did it.
Kai: It was an accident.
Ramad was staring at him now, he had no idea why. - Betrayal by Inaction: Bashat Bar Calis wanted Kai and the others out of the way, fearing they would interfere with Rising World Coalition Council negotiations. He knew that the Nient-Arik also wanted Kai and the others out of the way, and had plans to imprison them, but also knew their plan to capture them wouldn't work. Bashat secretly drugged Kai with a special concoction, then left him vulnerable for the Nient-Arik to capture.
- Black Magic: Expositor magic is powered by pain, death, and domination, and its practitioners tend to become amoral sociopaths in short order. Kai avoids being corrupted by it by using his own pain as a power source.
- Broken Hero: Kai remains a fundamentally good person, but the extermination of his human relatives, enslavement by the Hierarchs, freedom fighting, and subsequent political machinations have left him a self-described ball of razors. On the subject of powering magic with his pain, he wryly says that he has an inexhaustible supply.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Given that Expositor magic relies on enslavement, torment, and murder, every Expositor climbs to power atop a heap of bodies and every master-apprentice relationship is a betrayal waiting to happen.
- Les Collaborateurs: Karanis Calis, the puppet leader of the Benais-Arik who assassinated the previous leader and was put in charge when the Heirarchs took over. When Bashasa (the proper heir) escapes the Heirarchs' prison and returns, Karanis tries to kill him, too.
- Commonality Connection: Kai forms a rapport with a whale that an Expositor was using as a sea transport by sharing his own memories of enslavement.
- Demonic Possession: One of the things Kai and the other demons can do. In the past, before the Hierarchs' destruction, demons and the Saredi people had an arrangement wherein young demons would possess the dead of Saredi households and be raised like family. This gave the demons exposure to new cultures and ideas, built strong relationships between demons and humans, and also gave the Saredi witches— magical offspring of demons and humans. The arrangement had strict rules and respect for the original owner of the body's memory, and it was absolutely forbidden for any demon to possess any living human, even an enemy. During the battle with the Hierarchs, Kai accidentally possesses an Expositor when his host-body is too destroyed to support his spirit, and it's enough to turn the remaining demon survivors against him.
- Elemental Powers: Witches, for the most part, do magic through the use of elemental spirits, and tend to have an affinity for one kind over another. Ziede's magic works with air, while Tenes works with earth and plants.
- Establishing Character Moment: The first thing Kai does after gaining a physical form is to devour the life forces of the people who'd come to bind him. Then, he takes the shirt from one of the bodies, offers it to the little girl they had been going to sacrifice, and reassures her that he's not going to hurt her.Kai: Put that on and get up. I'm not going to eat you, we're friends.
- Familiar: Expositors can magically dominate unlucky witches, demons, or other mages, forcing them into a life of servitude. A common practice among them is to remove the voice of their familiars to prevent them from spreading information, and to periodically remove their memories so they don't know their origins, the details of their enslavement, or anything else that could be inconvenient.
- Familial Body Snatcher: A benign example, this is the traditional method for demon possession. Kai and many other demons are related to the Saredi people through Grandmother, a human who married a demon. An arrangement with the Saredi people permits young demons to possess the bodies of recent dead Saredi relatives and be raised like family. In the early flashback chapters, Kai recalls growing up with his beloved mortal cousins, aunts, and uncles.
- The Federation: The Rising World is a coalition of independent states that formed out of liberated territories to fight back the Hierarchs. Prince-Heir Bashat bar Calis would like to strengthen it into a full Empire with himself at the helm.
- Finding Judas: Ramad the vanguard was part of the conspiracy to imprison Kai. He had believed the imprisonment would be for the greater good of the Arike people, knew it would be temporary, and he's sincere in his desire to help Kai and Ziede free Tahren. It's not until the end of the novel that he realizes Bashat's betrayal was for nothing: Kai had preemptively ruined the Empire plan years ago, and that all Ramad and Bashat have accomplished is alienating a powerful demon and respected war hero of the Rising World Coalition.
- Flashback B-Plot: The present-day plot is interspersed with flashback chapters that tell the story of Kai's childhood, captivity among the Hierarchs, and participation in Bashasa's rebellion.
- Gambit Pileup: Bashat Bar Calis had Kai and the others incapacitated because he knew that the patriarch of the Immortal Blessed had his own plan to kidnap them. A year later, when he no longer wanted Kai and the others out of the way, he send Ramad, his personal vanguard to free them. However, Expositors working for the Immortal Blessed also wanted to get Kai: Menlas because he wanted to try and make Kai his familiar, Aclines because he was trying to clean up Menlas' mess, and Faharin because the Patriarch wanted Kai's knowledge of the location of a magical artifact. Somewhere in the mix, Brehama of the Nient-Arik is also scheming with the the Immortal Patriarch in order to take Benais-Arik's place as the ruling capitol of the Rising World, and want to kill Kai and the others to prevent them from interceding on Benais-Arik's behalf at the Rising World Imperial Renewal negotiations. And finally, Kai himself has a gambit; he knew Bashat was going to try to become emperor, and would likely try something to get him out of the way, and so began negotiating with the independent Enalin leaders years ago to ensure they would not support the creation of the empire. Their withdrawal of support, combined with the exposing of the Nient-Arik conspiracy to usurp the potential-imperial throne, resulted in the Imperial Renewal negotiations failing, leaving the Rising World Council as a coalition of independent nation states— just as Bashasa had wanted it to be.
- Ghost Memory: Demons get some residual memories from the bodies they possess. The Saredi use this to share some memories from their lost loved ones and, in rare cases, to expose murderers; Kai also inadvertently learns Expositor magic by possessing an Expositor.
- Grand Theft Me: In a twist, Kai is the one who steals others' bodies to possess. His last long-term body belonged to an enemy slain in battle. The current one was an unwilling victim of the Expositors, and Kai is angered by the fact that he can't even learn the young man's name.
- Human-Demon Hybrid: Witches are the descendants of demons who procreated while inhabiting human bodies, granting them magical powers.
- Human Sacrifice: Much of Expositor magic requires the death, pain, or life-force of other people. Their "wells" of power draw on imprisoned humans, using them like batteries. More specifically, the Expositor Menlas intended to sacrifice Sanja and the unnamed youth to bind Kai's spirit.
- Life Drinker: Infamously, demons can drain living or recently living beings with skin-to-skin contact, absorbing their power and withering them into husks. Kai uses this as a magical fuel source and a weapon in combat, but there's evidence that it can be used to restore life as well.
- Micro Monarchy: The Heirarchs wiped out a significant number of the continent's population, leaving entire kingdoms empty. By the time of the present day, about one human lifetime later, the majority of nations left are micro-monarchies simply due to their lack of population. One of the key elements of the Rising World Coalition Council is that it's trying to connect these tiny nations together.
- Not Quite Flight: Ziede can't fly, but she can control air elemental spirits that create wind around her and her companions, carrying them to where they need to go.
- Our Demons Are Different: They're the denizens of Underearth, a mutable otherworld that can only be reached via Astral Projection. On earth, they need human host bodies to interact with the world, giving them a shady reputation in some cultures even though they're not inherently evil or malicious.
- Our Witches Are Different: They're human-demon hybrids whose ancestry allows them to work magic through Nature Spirits. Ziede is also Long-Lived compared to a human, but it's not specified whether this is a common trait of witches.
- Out-Gambitted: The reason Kai, Ziede, and Tahren were imprisoned was so Bashasa's descendant, Bashat Bar Calis, could convince the other rulers to form an expansive empire, with Bashat in charge as the new emperor— something he knew Kai would resist. However, Kai had anticipated Bashat's imperial aspirations years ago and had gone to the independent Enalin leaders to convince them not to join the empire, thus losing pivotal support Bashat needed and preventing the empire from being formed.
- Possessing a Dead Body: Demons have no physical form on the surface world but can inhabit freshly deceased bodies — older corpses don't do. The body enters a Mortality Grey Area with a Healing Factor and minimal physical needs. Their old treaty with the Saredi was a consensual, respectful framework to do so, but Kai also makes do in an emergency by jumping into a stranger who died nearby.
- Powers via Possession: Inverted when Kai learns Expositor magic through the residual memories of an Expositor he possesses. The powers remain when he leaves the Expositor's body.
- Properly Paranoid: Kai, in regards to Bashat. He had known far in advance that Bashat would likely try to make a play for being emperor, and so preemptively ruined his chances by convincing the myriad of small city states against forming an empire. He hadn't expected Bashat to actually take him out of the picture by allowing other conspirators to imprison him, but he isn't surprised that it happened, only very angry.
- Psychic Link: Kai can telepathically communicate with Ziede because of a magical pearl in her heart. Ziede and Tahren have one too, though they are too far apart for the duration of the novel to use it. Ziede's inability to contact Tahren upon waking in the water tomb is what clues them in that Tahren may also be in trouble.
- Puppet King: When it became clear to the nations of the world that the Hierarchs could and would destroy them utterly if they resisted, it was common for existing rulers to be overthrown or assassinated by their family members and for the new ruler to be a puppet for the Hierarchs in exchange for their personal safety. The Nient-Arik were the first Arike kingdom to do so, and were the first kingdom conquered by the Hierarchs. The Benais-Arik also had a puppet king installed, but only after the majority of the royal family had been murdered.
- Red Baron: Since his role in Bashasa's revolution, Kai is Famed In-Story as the Witch King. It's something of a Non-Indicative Name as he's neither a Witch nor a King.
- She Is the King: The Arike city-states refer to their rulers as Princes or Prince-Heirs, regardless of gender. Kai's demon mother is also referred to as Overlord, despite being female. Relatedly, Demons don't care about matching age or gender when possessing dead bodies, and so Kai-Enna causes a little confusion when Bashasa finds out he's a male prince.
- Skull Cups: Demons in the underearth respect their dead differently than humans.Mother and Grandmother sat nearby, having tea out of the skulls of favored ancestors.
- Tailor-Made Prison:
- While the underwater tower holding Kai and Ziede wasn't originally made for them, there had been serious magical retrofitting done to transform it into a prison that would keep Kai's spirit bound, even after his host body died.
- The "Cageling Demon Court" was a prison made by the Hierarchs specifically to hold demons. They were chained to the ground in a huge pavilion with magical rain pouring down on them constantly, preventing their spirits from leaving even after their host bodies had died.
- Transformation of the Possessed: Demons in human bodies always gain monochromatic black eyes. It's enough of a giveaway that Kai obtains some decoy eyeballs when he needs to hide his true nature.
- Undying Loyalty: Kai to Bashasa. Bashasa was the Benais-Arik prince who freed Kai from the Hierarchs' torturous prison and led the revolution against them. He founded the Rising World Coalition Council after the Hierarchs' defeat and is implied to have been in a romantic relationship with Kai at some point. Regardless of whether there was romance or not, Kai remains fiercely loyal to Bashasa's memory and his vision for the new world, going so far as to sabotage Bashasa's descendant's attempt to create an empire similar to the Hierarchs'.
