Soulcatcher
From Glen Cook Wiki
Soulcatcher (real name Credence Senjak) is one of the Ten Who Were Taken, a powerful sorcerer compelled into the service of the Dominator. She is the first of the Taken the Company meets. She tends to wear outfits that completely cover her in black leather, with a black morion concealing her head. Although her outfit makes her appear androgynous, she is in fact a stunningly beautiful woman with black hair, blue eyes and pale skin, nearly identical in appearance to the Lady, her sister. Soulcatcher has the unnerving quirk of speaking in different voices every time she opens her mouth, allegedly the voices of all the souls she's captured. Demonic summoning is a specialty of hers; she brings several powerful entities into the world, including Tracker, Toadkiller Dog, and Frogface. Soulcatcher is the most powerful of the Taken, second only to Lady herself (according to Lady).
She is extremely bright, extraordinarily manipulative, and legendarily capricious; when given free rein she is virtually chaos incarnate.
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[edit] History: the North
Credence Senjak was one of the four Senjak sisters, a sibling of the Lady. She was Taken by the Dominator and became his mistress before or very early during the Domination (a fact which is not revealed until Soldiers Live, near the end of the series).
Interred and then revived with the rest of the Taken, Soulcatcher is at the heart of a conspiracy against the Lady; ostensibly working to free the Dominator, she actually seems to be playing everyone against each other. She hires the Black Company in Beryl as a useful tool in her schemes against the Lady, and remains reasonably friendly (for a Taken) as their patron until the Battle of Charm. Here, her treachery is revealed, and Lady and Croaker pursue her and decapitate her.
[edit] Resurrected again
Possessed of the supernatural vitality that seems par for the course among the Taken, decapitation only slows her down a bit. Believed dead for fifteen years, she surfaces again in the South, spying on Croaker and the Lady as they rebuild the Black Company and accept a commission in Taglios to fight the Shadowmasters. She waits for Croaker and Lady to confess their love for one another before kidnapping Croaker. She then forces him to reattach her head, restoring her to full power. After this, she secretly conspires with The Howler and Narayan Singh against Longshadow, betraying everyone in the end. She eventually succeeds in trapping Croaker, the Lady, and nearly 50 of the Company's leading figures in the Fortress of the Glittering Plain.
[edit] The Protector
Afterwards, she defeats the remaining Company loyalists in Kiaulune and declares herself the Protector of Taglios, in theory working for the Radisha but in fact running the show. She becomes bored and irritable, her murderously capricious moods incompatible with actually running a large empire. Soulcatcher actually welcomes the return of the Black Company from beyond the Shadowgate as a genuine challenge. In the end, she is outmaneuvered by Kina and knocked into a coma. Croaker and Lady stash her in the Fortress of the Glittering Plain, where she remains frozen, communicating to the world via the white crow, and waiting to be resurrected once again.
[edit] Miscellaneous: The Voices
The reason why Soulcatcher speaks in so many voices is a mystery. In the first book, there is a suggestion that she really does capture souls - once she kills a soldier by turning into a large dark cloud which kills him instantly; afterwards, the next voice she uses is that of the dead soldier. However, in one of the later books she uses Goblin's voice, and he is alive and well at the time. The Radisha, who works closely with Soulcatcher for years in Taglios, says the voices sometimes come with different personalities, and that some of the most absurd proclamations come from these alternate personalities rather than Soulcatcher herself. When she is agitated, she sounds like a committee arguing, with multiple voices coming simultaneouly from several directions. Croaker and others identify what they believe to be her "real" voice, a hard businesslike voice strongly reminiscent of Lady's, which Soulcatcher uses when she is being very serious. No answer is provided in the books, and likely none will ever be; but it seems likely that the voices are a sorcerous manifestation of schizophrenia.
