Imagine a hard-bitten mercenary company, the last of the 12 Free Companies of Khatovar, wielding swords, spies, sappers, and seige engines with equal facility in a world where wizards rule the battlefield and the last of the dragons was eaten millenia ago by something even more dangerous.
Imagine ten of the most powerful wizards in the world, all bound to serve one even more powerful than they: the Ten Who Were Taken.
Imagine a long-prophecied conflict between the Lady, merciless and remote in her power, binder of the Ten Who Were Taken, and the White Rose, who defeated the Lady over four hundred years ago… and who has been reincarnated to contend with the Lady for the rule of the world once more.
Imagine that the mercenaries of the Black Company have just betrayed their employer and signed up… on the wrong side.
The Black Company is military SF at it’s finest, making a mockery of epic battles between good and evil by focusing on the epic conflicts between lesser evil and greater evil, and never forgetting that sometimes a mouse could starve on the difference. Darkly pessimistic and evocative in a way that only the doomed can properly appreciate, Glen Cook invites us into a world that demonstrates why living in interesting times is not always desirable.
