The Black Company Universe

The Annals get written whether or not anyone survives to read them. That is the one Company law that never breaks. The Black Company is the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar — a mercenary outfit that takes the commission, marches, and does not ask whose cause is just, because down in the mud there is no just cause, only the paymaster and the next walled town. Glen Cook's saga is soldiering fantasy told from below the officers: Croaker, the Company's physician and Annalist, keeps the books, and the books are these. The annals run in movements. The Books of the North — The Black Company, Shadows Linger, The White Rose — bind the Company into the service of the Lady, a sorceress-empress whose enemies happen to be worse than she is. The Books of the South — Shadow Games, Dreams of Steel — turn the survivors homeward, hunting the Company's own forgotten origins in the far south. The Books of the Glittering Stone — Bleak Seasons, She Is the Darkness, Water Sleeps, Soldiers Live — close out the long march. Around the spine stand the offshoot The Silver Spike and the later interquel Port of Shadows, with fresh annals still being set down. Cook writes nearly all of it himself. No chosen ones ride here, and no war comes out clean. Wizards are casual, patient monsters; a victory costs more than a rout; and it is all narrated by exhausted men who would sooner be drinking. This is the book that taught modern grimdark its trade. Begin at the beginning — The Black Company — and read as they were written. Each annal takes for granted what the last one buried.