The ghoul choked out, “I didn’t know you were a…”
“Say it.” Kai smiled.
“…a demon.”
“You idiot.” Kai leaned closer to whisper, “I’m the demon.”
Kaiisteron – Prince of the Fourth House of the underearth, of the tent of Kentdessa Saredi – wakes up in a glass coffin in an underground, underwater chamber, with no memory of how he got there or how long he’s been unconscious. Also, he appears to have been dead and decaying for a while, and he can sense that his friend Ziede is trapped nearby as well. The situation is just annoying enough that when some very dangerous people arrive – dragging along a couple of brutalized slaves as a sacrifice – Kai jumps into a newly-dead body and proceeds to murder everyone.
The screaming and pleading was noisy and irritating, more so from mortals who had not bothered to listen to the screaming and pleading of their own captives.
Martha Wells’s Hugo-nominated novel is an entirely different genre from her Murderbot series, although the main character has a little bit of the same outsider, wildly competent and powerful, occasionally grumpy “oh great, another thing to deal with” energy. He’s also been branded as something of a misfit due to some of the things he’s had to do to survive the last few decades. And interestingly enough, taking over the body of a newly-dead mortal is not one of the things that’s tarnished his reputation, since among the demons and their allies that’s completely normal.
When Kai had first come to the mortal world, he could step between his borrowed mortal body and his original form in the underearth anywhere.
The nomadic people of the Saredi have an arrangement with the demons of the underearth that’s surprisingly benign, including their custom of inviting demons to inhabit the body of someone who recently died. The demon has a physical form which they can instantly heal from any injury (including whatever it was that killed the mortal), and in return the families can get a little closure, some information from the recently-deceased’s memories before they fade, and even possibly more children. (The children of demon-possessed bodies are witches, with a much longer lifespan and their own unique magical abilities.) I kept being surprised by Kai’s feelings for the young woman who’s body he inhabited when he first came to the mortal plane. Even though Kai never met Enna, he feels incredibly tender towards her, and miserably homesick when he’s forced to leave the body behind.
And Kai has a lot to feel homesick about, because he only has a couple of years with the Saredi before he, and the rest of the world, loses pretty much everything.
“The world used to be a much bigger place, with so many more people in it.”
The book is told in two parts. The present-day chapters are where Kai and his friends are caught up in a plot that they don’t even know the purpose of, much less who’s responsible. The other chapters are flashbacks to the time right around when an invading force called the Hierarchs burned a good portion of the world down, slaughtering the entire race of the Saredi, and capturing witches and demons, of which there won’t be a lot more because they also managed to seal off the mortal world from the underearth so no new demons will arrive and the ones already here can never go home. The Hierarchs are powerful, ruthless, and a lot of their magic involves creating wells of power from mass torture and murder. And they’re also entirely gone in the present day. Maybe. Hopefully. If the plot to capture Kai and his friends was put into motion by one of their allies, and not a returning nightmare.
The above summary makes it sound like all the explanations were neatly laid out before jumping into the main story, and I can assure you that it’s anything but that. I found the first half of this book utterly baffling. I’ve read books where the exposition is dumped onto the reader in one big chunk (or a hundred footnotes), and others where the author drops the reader into the middle of the action and then lets the world reveal itself like ripples in a pond. This is the first book I’ve read where the exposition never stops happening. So in the opening chapters we’re still expected to keep up with a mountain of details about magical powers, different races, invading forces, alliances, and betrayals. I gradually started understanding what was going on, but the way the information was conveyed meant we have a mystery where we’re still learning information about all the suspects as the mystery is being solved.
The author kept me from chucking the book across the room in frustration by making it packed with fascinating details about the different cities and villages, how magic works, and the complex relationships between everyone involved. Sometimes it felt like new magical powers were being invented whenever the plot needed one; my two favorites were Kai creating a mostly transparent boat from a wrecked barge by convincing the wreckage it was still a boat, and a rescued witch killing a bodyguard with flowers. But there’s also dazzling images of new cities and flooded ruins, pack-animals big enough to hold a palanquin with dozens of riders, a whale with a house-sized nautilus shell grafted onto its back, Kai shrugging off stab wounds in battle and being generally terrifying, and Kai’s witch-friend Zeide using wind-devils to let her fly or invisibly knock down opponents, or occasionally being even more terrifying than Kai because she has zero patience and also her spouse is missing.
“Whose skin am I going to peel off until someone tells me where my wife is?”
The alternating chapters mean the information we learn in one timeline is echoed in the other. It also means that as we’re seeing a scrappy rebellion sixty years in the past, we also see that winning a war doesn’t mean the conflict stops, it just means that the balance of power goes to someone else. No matter how thoroughly you defeat the enemy, there’s now a new faction to rebel against, or betray, or form other alliances against, meaning new allies to betray, and so on, and so on.
There were a few things hinted at that were never fully revealed, just left as something that of course everyone knows about, but no one talks about it because the people involved are still a little sensitive. I’m actually surprised that this is supposed to be a standalone book, because the very nature of the story means there’s several books worth of stories left to tell.