In Shadow Games, the first Book of the South in the Chronicles of the Black Company, we follow the Company on its journey southward towards the near-mythical Khatovar, a city not on any map, yet nevertheless faithfully recorded in the company Annals. Their quest does not lack for opposition, however, for the Shadowmasters are determined to bar their path, and there are hints that those long thought dead have come south to pursue old enmities as well.
And so the Black Company resolves to force their way through, beginning with the battle for Dejagore… a battle that ends in disaster, with Croaker and the Lady fallen on the field, and the ragged remnants of the company holding out within the city, under siege by the Shadowmaster’s forces. Dreams of Steel, also called the Book of Lady, takes up the story as the Lady digs herself out from beneath a pile of corpses on the battlefield of Dejagore. With no chance to reach the city, and the enemies forces ruling the field, Lady has no choice but to flee to the Black Company’s present employers and raise a new force to relieve the siege. No easy task, but none could be better suited for it than the Lady herself, once-empress and sorceress. And even as her military genius reasserts itself, so too does her sorcery; weak as a kitten at first, and yet growing rapidly. The Lady of old may yet return, with the grief of Croaker’s death calling forth an oath of terrible vengeance upon his killers.
And yet the Lady’s powers are not the only unexpected players returning to the game. The Taken do not die easily, and what yet lives can yet hold a grudge…
