Empress
core novel 2007 Godspeaker
Record
| First published | 2007 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.52 (6,314 ratings, collected 2026-10-09) |
| Page count | 560 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780732284510 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
Hekat grows up in a harsh desert wasteland in the land of Mijak, unwanted by her impoverished family and beaten by her father, until he sells her to the slave traders Abajai and Yagji. Travelling south with them to their home city of Et-Raklion, she discovers that she has a rare and dangerous gift, the power of hearing the god, and in Mijak, where religion rules every part of life, where godspeakers read the god's will in the entrails of sacrifices and blood flows in every ritual, that gift is a ladder. Hekat escapes her masters to serve the warlord Raklion as a warrior, trains in arms and in the god's power, and climbs, ruthlessly and with the god's voice in her head, from slave to the most powerful woman in Mijak, convinced that the god wills her to unite the land under one ruler and then conquer the world beyond it.
Where it sits
- Universe: Godspeaker
- Series: Godspeaker Trilogy core; position 1 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Karen Miller
Notes
- Published in Australia as Empress of Mijak (HarperCollins Voyager, July 2007), the ISBN recorded; Empress in North America and the UK (Orbit, 2008).
- From the series record (Godspeaker Trilogy): Karen Miller's dark theocratic epic of two lands, the blood-soaked desert empire of Mijak and the island kingdom of Ethrea: Hekat, a slave girl who hears the god and rises to be Mijak's empress, and Rhian, the princess who must hold Ethrea's throne against its own lords and then against Mijak.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series Godspeaker Trilogy: position 1 of 3: next The Riven Kingdom (2007)
Sources
← Godspeaker dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.