The Black Company

These definitely weren't the liberating heroes you were expecting.

"We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant...."

– Croaker

The Black Company is Glen Cook's long running grim high fantasy series about a band of simple sellswords getting by in a world full of mass-murdering demigods.

The titular Black Company (last of the Free Companies of Khatovar as reads its full name) is a mercenary outfit which for the last several hundred years has cut a bloody trail generally northward, fighting for whomever can afford them for as long as they can afford them. By the standards of sellswords, they're fairly elite, fighting as heavy infantry with a handful of wizards for support. Admission to their ranks is by vote, and a prospect is expected to give up all previous attachments.

After a particularly irritating few years killing people for money in the Jewel Cities, the company was approached by a mysterious envoy from the north seeking to hire them to suppress a rebellion. A proposal which the company (after closing out its previous commitments with owed interest) hesitantly accepts...

At an impressive 11 books (and counting), the series enjoys great popularity with servicemen, veterans, and every poor dreg with military experience. This is because the book is written by a vet with a no-bullshit, non-romantic, non-critical, and non-ideological depiction of war and fighting for faceless entities and reasons. Despite the abundance of High Fantasy fare of fancy magic, powerful artifacts, otherworldly forces, and even a literal BBEG, plenty of character motivations revolve around just getting shit done. Character-driven plots despite extremely mortal characters, and any worldbuilding is but a happy little accident of Glen Cook's talent for putting you straight into the action. Black Company is, for all intents and purposes, Ernst Jünger for fantasy nerds.

Grim High Fantasy?

trust me this man is very much alive and is actually one of the most powerful wizards in the setting.

Yes. The Black Company is GRIM high fantasy. So all the slavery, raping, and looting you'd expect of a dark age sellsword mob, but now combined with sadistic wizardry. You've captured an enemy leader? Spend a week killing and resurrecting them until their will is broken. A rival immortal wizard is in your way? Bury him alive and make it look like someone else did it (cuz eventually he'll dig himself out). A hundred thousand rebels encircling your city? Issue pots filled with a horrid magic disease to a wizard and have them carpet bomb the enemy from the top of their magic carpet. The further in the books you get, the grander in scale and creativity in committing Geneva Code violations.

After all, why not overtune the lethality and brutality of your methods in a setting wherein magic can heal almost every wound and at the very LEAST quadruple a practitioner's life expectancy? This is High Fantasy after all.

The Black Company is stuck in a world wherein the dark perversity of men at a brutal and dirty war meets the dark potential of sorcery resulting in wagonloads of dead. And for a lot of it, they're not even sure they're killing the side that deserves it.

Personalities

It should be noted that nobody, NOBODY in this setting uses their given name. For the Company members, it's because they shed their past identity when they join. Their given nickname is all the identity they need. But for wizards it's much more important. This is a setting where true names have power, so naturally any wizard is going to go to great lengths to erase their past.

As the series is literally named after a centuries-old mercenary company that will be fighting dozens of conflicts, it is healthy to both keep in mind that there will be a rich and particularly colorful collection of characters and that a number of them will not be retiring peacefully.

• Croaker: The company's physician and annalist; serves as the narrator for most of the books. Though his stupid name (his voice always croaks like a man on his deathbed) and propensity for being a depressing pedantic dork implies otherwise, this man is probably the greatest romeo in all of fiction.

• Goblin & One-Eye: Two of the company's wizards; both are well over a century old. They're more illusionists by trade but when they really get in the right mind they can get up to some pretty evil stuff. Most of the time they expend their energies on each other in a petty Gork & Mork style feud that's been running longer than most of the company's members have been alive.

• Silent: The company's most powerful wizard by far. Genuinely is a wizard unlike the previous two geezers. Never says anything; has his reasons.

• Raven: The Company's newest recruit, joining when they left Beryl to enter the service of Soulcatcher. Charisma is his dump stat. Trust me when I say that despite the grimdark and the METAL-iness of the setting, this guy is the edgiest character in the entire series. Croaker, the Company leadership, the mutes, and even the walking-talking nukes like to joke around and shoot the shit. This guy is just The Crow (pun intended) in dark fantasyland.

• Darling: A camp follower of the company; a mute girl rescued from a good old fashioned soldier rape gang by Raven shortly after he joined the Company. Under Silent's tutelage she eventually develops some power of her own, although more along the lines of holy nullification. Along the way also learns and develops a sign language which doubles as her main form of communication and the Company's Atreides-style battle language.

• Elmo: Croaker's closest friend and the company's leading sergeant. Sharp enough to present himself as a thick brute. Like Croaker, he has enough conscience to recognize they're all scum; unlike Croaker, he doesn't let it get him down.

• The Captain: A real greyhaired badass and great military leader you'd think of a grizzled mercenary captain. Ironically is one of, if not, the most enigmatic members of the company with his past only hinted in minute observations by Croaker.

• The Lieutenant: The company's second-in-command with a long background in warfare and military engineering long before he even joined the Company.

• Soulcatcher: An enigmatic, sexually-ambiguous, wizard of obscene power, a member of the Ten Who Were Taken. Catcher hires the Black Company to come and fight against rebels for The Lady.

• The Lady: The somewhat immortal ruler of an empire in the north; the Ten Who Were Taken are her minions and rivals to power. Took an interest in Croaker after learning about the chronicles he maintains.

• The Limper: A particularly hapless member of the Ten who is constantly upstaged by the Black Company and repeatedly betrayed by Catcher. Don't let this fool you however as he is easily the most sadistic and vindictive of the Taken, a real bastard who deserves all the shit he gets and this is saying a lot in this setting filled to brim with real amoral sons of bitches.

• Old Man Tree: A literal sentient tree, growing in the dead center of a magic-irradiated desert hundreds of miles in diameter, where reality has been twisted by evilness-fallout into something resembling a Max Ernst painting of Dune. The tree was planted to imprison the undead corpse of a BBEG from forgotten times and doesn't take kindly to all these mortals on his lawn.

• The Dominator: The most powerful being in the world and is very much evil. Once ruled over an empire that encompassed the entire North of the giant continent the books are set in. Currently asleep, thank goodness.

Gallery

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  Expect a lot of schizophrenic ramblings from Croaker.