Skip to content
Answering Your Questions About Reactor: Right here.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Everything in one handy email.
When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

Excerpts Excerpts

The Beginning: Read an Excerpt From Martha Wells’ Witch King

After being murdered, his consciousness dormant and unaware of the passing of time while confined in an elaborate trap, Kai awakes...

By

Published on April 24, 2023

A remarkable story of power and friendship, of trust and betrayal, and of the families we choose.

We’re thrilled to share an extended excerpt Witch King, the first new fantasy from author Martha Wells in over a decade—available May 30th from Tordotcom Publishing. Read an excerpt below, or check out the first three chapters here. You can also download a sneak peak preview for your preferred ereader!

After being murdered, his consciousness dormant and unaware of the passing of time while confined in an elaborate water trap, Kai wakes to find a lesser mage attempting to harness Kai’s magic to his own advantage. That was never going to go well.

But why was Kai imprisoned in the first place? What has changed in the world since his assassination? And why does the Rising World Coalition appear to be growing in influence?

Kai will need to pull his allies close and draw on all his pain magic if he is to answer even the least of these questions.

He’s not going to like the answers.


 

 

The Past: The Beginning

I dream of the world as it was: Suneai-arik and a hundred caravans a day from the north, with silks and icewine and amber and books, canal barges from the ports of the Arkai with the treasures and curiosities of the archipelagoes. The people, familiar and strange, merchants from Nibet, Enalin scholars and diplomats, sailors of Erathi and Palm, even a solitary Grass King from the far west. The food, the music, the laughter.

They say that Salasi the satirist saw what was coming and flushed the birds from their cages in the forum garden. But they all fell from the sky when the voice of the Hierarchs’ Well rose.

—Letter found in the Benais-arik archives, attributed to an unnamed survivor of Suneai-arik

Kai had only been in the late Enna’s mortal body for two full rounds of the seasons, when he woke his cousin Adeni by flinging himself on top of him. Adeni groaned and used his pillow and sharp elbows as a shield against Kai’s flailing arms. “Stop! You’re going to break the beds!” Adeni hissed at him.

Kai braced himself against the heavy guide rope that steadied the bunks against the canvas wall. It was just barely dawn; the roof slope of the great tent of Kentdessa Saredi stretched high above, still deep in shadow. The light, falling through the ventilation holes where the stabilizing cables ran through the canvas, was still a deep gray. Kai kept his voice low to keep from waking everyone else in the sleeping partition. “I’m not! Come on, get up, we’re going to be late.”

“All right, all right.” Adeni sat up and swatted him with the pillow. Kai just laughed and swung over to the side of the scaffold to climb down past the sleeping forms of his mortal cousins.

It was darker down in this part of the partition, where the wall-curtains blocked the dawn light from the lower level of the tent. But even in Enna’s mortal body, Kai could see the painted scenes covering every bit of hide and canvas, all from stories about the clan’s ancestors, the rich colors shifting in the dim light. The evening candlelight would make them appear to move, something Kai found just as fascinating to watch as his cousins did. It felt a little like his old home, in the changeable landscape of the underearth.

Kai dropped to the tent floor. Up toward the top, Adeni was throwing his blankets around, but everyone else was quiet except for snoring.

Other parts of the tent were already awake. Pottery clattered somewhere a few partitions over, and Kai heard distant voices. He dug into his chest of belongings and changed out of his light sleeping shirt into a tunic and pants and embroidered tabard. The warmer season meant there was no need for a heavier outer coat; he didn’t feel the cold like mortals did, but the clan captain had told him to try to emulate his cousins whenever possible, as a courtesy to Enna’s remains. He found his boots buried under the lowest bunk in the stack, currently occupied by a snuffling Aunt Laniaa, and slipped through the opening between the curtains.

He followed the passageway between the sleeping rooms to their section’s eating area. It was a wide circular space, with coal-filled braziers for pots of millet porridge, and smaller kettles of hot water for goat milk tea. Kai sat down on a mat and by the time he got his boots on, Adeni arrived and plopped down beside him.

Uncle Guardi filled the warming pots from a bigger kettle brought in from the outdoor kitchen. Passing Adeni a portion of porridge, he said, “Kai-Enna, do you want these?” He held out a bowl with treats left over from last night, mostly twists of dried goat meat flavored with sorghum syrup and hot spices.

Buy the Book

Witch King

Witch King

“Yes, please, Uncle.” Kai took the bowl happily. He could last a long time, half a season maybe, without food, but it was better not to and he liked the taste and texture.

With his mouth full, Adeni demanded, “Hey, why does Kai-Enna get treats and not me?”

Kai was pretty certain it was because he was currently the only demon in the Kentdessa clan and one of the youngest in the Saredi. There were about a hundred demons right now scattered throughout all the clan tents camped here, and more in the clans traveling to the south. Uncle Guardi said repressively, “Because Kai-Enna didn’t wake half the herder night shift barely two hours after they crawled into bed last night.”

“Respectfully, I think you’re exaggerating, Uncle.” Adeni’s voice was muffled by porridge.

Kai added, “It was a third of them at most.”

Uncle snapped a towel at them.

Kai finished his bowl while Adeni was still eating, then fixed his braids that had come loose while he was asleep, fixed Adeni’s braids, and answered a dozen questions from people heading out to chores about where he and Adeni were going so early.

Finally Adeni finished and they started out, stopping by the stores partition to collect bows and quivers before following the passageway out to the tent’s main entrance.

The day was bright, the breeze was cool and brisk, scented with sweet grasses, dung from the goat and horse herds, and woodsmoke. Kentdessa loomed over them like a small domed mountain of canvas and cable. It was part of a roughly circular cluster of enormous clan tents, standing on the plain above a wide shallow river that glittered in the morning sun. The endless stretch of grass spread out behind them, dotted with the occasional stand of tall spreading trees. Kai couldn’t see it from this angle, but each tent roof was painted with the individual clan sigils and colors. The paint was fading now, worn down by sun and weather, but would be renewed at the big gathering that marked the end of the Cold Wind season. They passed the outdoor kitchen with its firepits and clay ovens, the cooks busy making breakfast and bread for the day, and Kai managed to drag Adeni past before he could stop to eat again.

It was a fair walk to the river, since the camp was set well back to be safe from seasonal flooding. If Adeni had been alone, he would have taken his horse. But the Saredi horses were distrustful of demon-scent and it wasn’t worth the time it took Kai to calm one for this short a journey.

The clans had been situated here since the start of the Golden Light season and would stay until the end of Green Changes season. They were downstream of the wooden pipes and trenches that carried water to the gardens and drinking tanks, and upstream from the latrines and bathing pools. It was a sensible system, even though the clan’s spirit-workers would regularly purify the water. They passed the outskirts of the last tent, Elinvassa, and started across the grassy floodplain, when Adeni said, “So who are you going to marry?”

Kai laughed. “Nobody. I’m only supposed to have babies.” Grandmother had explained that on the first day Kai had awoken in late Enna’s body. The clan hoped for at least one baby, would be pleased for more, but Kai was absolutely not to do anything that might cause a baby for three more full rounds of the seasons. It wasn’t because they were waiting for Enna to change; her body would stay as it was at the moment of her death until Kai left it. But Grandmother said the delay was to make sure Kai understood mortal life. He had one more season to go, though he felt he understood it pretty well at this point.

Adeni pulled his quiver higher on his shoulder. “Right, but that doesn’t mean you can’t marry someone, too.” He flicked a quick smile at Kai, somehow shyer than his usual broad grin. He was half a season round older than Enna’s body and had been the first one to grab Kai’s arm and drag him outside after the awakening ceremony. They had run all the way around Kentdessa, under the giant cable web of the outer supports.

“Marry who?” Kai demanded. Then he had a sudden suspicion. “Marry you?”

“Well, me and Varra and Iludi.” These were two other cousins. Kai spent a lot of time with them but most of his adventures had been with Adeni. Everything from exploring the caves where the bear-people Liberni hibernated to scandalizing the elders by climbing the outside of Kentdessa, though that one had almost ended disastrously. But the four of them also just talked and told stories, out all night with the herds, lying in the grass under the stars. Adeni added, “Just think about it.”

“Think about sleeping in a double bunk with your smelly feet?” Kai said, mostly because he wasn’t sure if Adeni was joking or not.

Adeni grinned and gave Kai’s shoulder a shove. “If I’m willing to put up with getting tossed out of bed before dawn every day, you can put up with my feet.”

They were almost to the river, with more mud and pebbles underfoot than grass now. It was nearly three hundred paces broad at this point, with a wide band of shallows along the bend, though the current changed and carved out different channels with every rainstorm along its course. There must have been a storm in the hills upstream sometime late last night; the broad banks were littered with broken tree branches. A splintered trunk as wide as Kai was tall had jammed in a sandbar that marked the edge of the deeper water.

It had also destroyed the rope bridge the builders had strung across the narrowest part of the river, that Kai and Adeni meant to use to get to the hunting grounds on the far side. The ropes and shattered planks were mixed in with the debris along the sandy banks, the support poles wrenched half out of the ground.

Kai halted in disappointment. “Well, this is shitty. How long do you think it will take to fix it?” It wasn’t going to be this morning, that was for sure. They would miss the perama migration completely.

Adeni watched him a moment, then smacked him on the back. “Come on, we can wade across.”

“I can’t.” Exasperated, Kai waved at him and pointed to his eyes. “Remember?”

“Water doesn’t hurt, does it?” Adeni poked Kai in the shoulder. “I’ve seen you take baths.”

“No. It just feels strange, when it’s between me and the ground.” Like he was hollow and empty, like part of him was missing, but that was hard to explain to a mortal.

“It won’t take us long to wade across. And our clothes will dry fast.” Adeni nudged Kai again. “You’ve been looking forward to this, you don’t want to miss it.”

Kai didn’t want to miss it, and he didn’t want Adeni to miss it. They would have to wait a full season round for another chance at hunting perama. He looked around. They were the only ones out by the river, and a large stand of cedar blocked them from the view of the camp. “All right, but don’t tell Grandmother or the captain.”

“Sure, that’s the first thing I’ll do, go to our Revered Ancestor and the captain and say, ‘Guess what I talked Kai into?’ And then we can both shovel goat shit and dig latrines for the next season.” Adeni tugged on his arm. “Come on, let’s hurry before anybody sees us.”

Kai followed Adeni down the gentle slope of the bank into the shallows. As soon as both his feet were in the water, he felt his connection to the underearth fade to a trickle of awareness. He took a sharp breath. It wasn’t something he thought about all the time, but losing it felt like stepping off a cliff. He felt alone and oddly unmoored.

Adeni had stopped to watch him. “All right?”

Kai nodded. He supposed it was a good idea to get used to it; he would be spending a long time on the upper earth and he was sure to need to cope with running water over and over again. “Let’s hurry.”

They picked their way forward. The fast-moving water carried a chill that Kai could just feel through the waxed leather of his boots. He was a little afraid Adeni might think it was funny to push him over, but Adeni showed no sign of that, instead forging ahead to find the shallowest water, leading them over the sandbars and finding pathways between the branches and debris. Every time Kai stepped onto a sandbar or climbed atop a tree trunk, his connection to the underearth returned, a warm flicker under his skin. This wasn’t as hard as he had expected and he was glad Adeni had talked him into it.

They were near the large broken trunk caught on the island when Kai stepped onto a sandbar and had a moment of… not warning, just a pulse from under his heart, where his connection to his real body in the underearth lived, a shiver through his skin that made his eyes water. But there was nothing in this river but fish and a few snakes. Adeni was ahead by ten or so paces, closer to the trunk, looking for a route that didn’t involve Kai wading into deeper water. “Adeni, wait—”

Water exploded just past the trunk. A gray shape rose up to tower over them. It opened a round mouth with a rictus of fangs and slammed the shattered tree aside. As it barreled toward them, Adeni yelled for Kai to run and flung himself sideways. Kai didn’t run, he bolted forward.

If it hadn’t been for the water, Kai would have made it. But to reach Adeni he plunged into thigh-deep shallows. Even with his underearth-given strength, it was like moving in slow motion. The creature whipped around as Adeni struggled up the slope of the island. Adeni’s knife was in his hand and he stabbed at the wide maw looming over him.

Kai reached the island and scrambled up the soft slope. His hands closed around the roll of fat at the creature’s neck. He had never done this before on anything but plants, with the eldest demon in the clans standing by to make sure his control didn’t falter. He felt his real body, held in suspension in the rock under the realm of the Fourth House with all the others who had taken the Saredi bargain to come to the upper world. He touched the life inside this river creature, the blood running through its veins like streaks of light, and pulled it out through his hands. The Saredi called this “eating life.” It wasn’t something demons could do in the underearth, only here in the mortal world.

The creature’s life flowed into Kai, a stunning burst of energy like a too-close lightning strike, energy he had no idea what to do with. Then the creature flung its head to the side and Kai was in the air. He tumbled over its body and slammed down on the wet sand of the island.

Kai couldn’t move, all that power running uselessly under his skin. The river creature staggered away, then slumped down into the water, half its body dried and collapsed like an empty air bladder. Then he saw Adeni.

He lay on his back just a few steps away on the other side of the little island, his legs trailing into the water. His blood soaked into the sand, but his chest was still moving. His head was turned toward Kai, eyes unfocussed.

Stolen life was still sparking off Kai’s hands. He tried to push himself up. If he could reach Adeni, could he give him the life before it faded? No one had ever suggested this was possible but suddenly it seemed as if it might be, as if this was the natural thing to do with all this sparking light in Enna’s veins.

Kai struggled so hard to drag himself forward his vision blurred and he suddenly saw his own body, Enna’s body. Slumped on the ground, his eyes still open, hands stretched out, fingers digging into the sand. In the next heartbeat it was his body again, grit grinding under his fingernails, staring into Adeni’s fixed, empty gaze.

***

Kai was barely aware of frantic splashing through the water and someone carefully lifting him. He remembered being carried back into the shadow of the great tent in dreamlike fragments.

He came back to himself gradually, lying on soft blankets, the heavy scent of river cedar incense in the air. His throat felt raw, like he had breathed and swallowed water, or been crying in his sleep. He rubbed his face and Grandmother’s voice said, “Ah, there he is.”

He opened his eyes to see her right above him, and realized he was lying with his head in her lap. “Where’s Adeni?” he tried to say, and it came out as a barely audible croak.

“He died, little one,” she said, stroking his hair. “Did you try to step out of Enna’s body into his? You shouldn’t do that, Kai, you might not be able to get back in.”

“I don’t know,” he said. Grandmother was the only mortal who could travel back and forth to the underearth; if she said he had tried to leave his mortal body, she should know, but Kai hadn’t thought it was possible. “I didn’t know I could.”

“It’s possible he did,” another voice said. Kai turned his head a little and saw a dozen people sitting on cushions and mats in Grandmother’s room. The clan captain, the sub-captain, family elders of Enna’s line, and demons from other clans. The demon who had spoken was Doniqtian in the body of the late Kaened of clan Garoshon, the oldest demon in the camp. “He shouldn’t have been able to drain that beast, and yet. And in water, too.”

“It wasn’t deep, and he would have been standing on the island,” said Arn-Nefa, a demon from the tent of Kanavesi. She was in the body of an older mortal man, but she had only been in the upper earth for four rounds of the seasons longer than Kai. She and her mortal sisters had often gone hunting with Kai and Adeni. “Kai is very fast. If he couldn’t kill the beast in time, it couldn’t be done.”

A mortal Raneldi elder asked, “But why was he placed in the body of a small youth?”

“Because he is a youth.” Grandmother stroked his hair. “And Enna was dying, and the honor was due to her line.” Enna’s elders eyed the Raneldi without favor.

“He should not have gone in the river,” someone else said. “It was careless, foolish.”

“No one questions that,” Grandmother said, in the tone that meant she was tired of hearing it. “Children are often careless. Is there any word where that animal came from?”

“We know it should live closer to the coast, somewhere downriver in Erathi, and it was under geas, driven here by foreign powers.” That was Benati, captain of Kentdessa, her voice calm but with an undercurrent of worry.

“A scout,” Grandmother said, a frown in her voice. “A spy? Have there been messages from our allies in Erathi recently?”

“Not since the last trade caravan, that was at the beginning of this season,” Doni-Kaened said. The Saredi and parts of the borderlands got their metals from the Erathi, who traded for it from the other sea people.

Grandmother’s brow furrowed. “Send riders, and ahead of them send crow-messengers. Those who can speak Witch, send to the eastern Border Hills sanctum. Ask them to See for us toward the coast.” She stroked his hair again. “Kai, do you wish to visit Adeni’s body?”

Kai’s throat closed and he couldn’t speak, but he nodded.

“If you can stand, I’ll take you.” Her strong hand gripped his shoulder. “But you mustn’t try to look for him in his body, he’s gone now. Swear to me you won’t.”

“I swear,” Kai managed, tears making his vision swim.

Kai knew it had been the death of his mortal cousin, but he hadn’t known it had been the beginning of the death of the Saredi. That Erathi had already fallen and the Hierarchs’ forces were on their way.

Excerpted from Witch King, copyright © 2023 by Martha Wells

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Martha Wells

Author

Learn More About Martha
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments