The Black Company

From Glen Cook Wiki

The Black Company

From the back cover:

Some feel the Lady, newly risen from centuries in thrall, stands between humankind and evil. Some feel she is evil itself. The hardbitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must, burying their doubts with their dead.

Until the prophecy: The White Rose has been reborn, somewhere, to embody good once more.

There must be a way for the Black Company to find her...

1 ISBN(s)
2 Misc
3 Analysis
4 Characters (alphabetical order)

ISBN(s)

0-812-52139-0

Misc

319 pages of lightning action
First edition: May 1984.
Chapter Three, in a different version, appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in August 1982, under the name of "Raker".
Cover art by Keith Berdak.
"The cover of The Black Company was a cover somebody made up for me. It was just an example. The marketing guy absolutely didn't want it. But, while it was on his desk, a buyer from a large chain bookstore came in and, not knowing anything about the book, said "I'll buy fifty thousand copies of anything with that on the cover," so they went with it." - Glen Cook, in an interview with Quantum Muse, 2002.

Analysis

In the confrontation between Harden, Soulcatcher, Stormbringer, Shapeshifter, and The Hanged Man why did Soulcatcher allow Croaker to live when he knew they had allowed The Hanged Man to die? Is this a slip on her part or was it deliberate? Did she not realize that The Lady would probe Croaker?