Shed’s financial-management skills, however, leave something to be desired, and his actions soon create problems for everyone. There’s also a second storyline, which follows a cowardly, put-upon innkeeper named Maran Shed, who desperately needs money, and learns of a dark way of making it. However, Raven and his charge, Darling, a girl who may be the reincarnation of someone with the power to destroy the Lady, have come back into the picture, and Croaker is finding it harder to hide this secret from his powerful employer. The Black Company is now in a city in the far north, investigating a strange new threat to The Lady. The first book wandered across a landscape of battlefields and took a while to cohere around a narrative, but this one has more continuity.
Croaker and his friends aren’t the heroes sitting at table with Elrond in Rivendell - they’re the rank-and-file out patrolling the slums for masters they don’t love, putting down uprisings by unwashed rebels with their own dubious leaders, and the cynicism shows. The background is a standard fantasy world, with castles, swordsmen, taverns, wizards, crypts, undead creatures, and powerful sorcerers, but there’s something about the world-weary, grunt-level view of it that I found refreshing. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another." Cook’s style here is similar to the first book, a hard-boiled account that doesn’t waste too much time on world-building or character backstories, but simply relates events as they seem important to Croaker. I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive.
As the lead narrator, a soldier/healer/annalist named Croaker puts it: "I do not believe in evil. Cook did something innovative for the time, which was to unshackle himself from the usual good-vs-evil conventions of fantasy, and write something darker and more subjective. The second book in the now three-decades-old Black Company series, which still remains a good read.
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