Port of Shadows occupies a strange place in the chronology of the Black Company; it predates almost all of the history we know, picking the story up after the first book and before the second. The author appears to be numbering it 1.5. Thank god for decimals.
This is not a good place to start the series. Read The Black Company (the first book of the series by the same name) for that.
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.
The White Rose is the third book in the Chronicles of the Black Company. The Lady’s victory over her husband the Dominator at Juniper Shadows Linger came with a high price: the loss of the Black Company, long sworn to her service, to follow the White Rose… the prophecied rebel who first imprisoned her and her husband 400 years ago, now reborn to meet the Lady’s renewed threat. All unknowing, the Black Company had sheltered the White Rose herself within their ranks, and when the Taken begin to turn on them, chose survival and personal loyalty over the Lady’s service.
In Shadow Games , the first Book of the South in the Chronicles of the Black Company, we follow the Company on its journey southward towards the near-mythical Khatovar, a city not on any map, yet nevertheless faithfully recorded in the company Annals. Their quest does not lack for opposition, however, for the Shadowmasters are determined to bar their path, and there are hints that those long thought dead have come south to pursue old enmities as well.
Shadow Games is the first of the Books of the South, the second part of the Chronicles of the Black Company. Following the events of The White Rose and roughly contemporaneous with The Silver Spike , Shadow Games follows Croaker and the Black Company on the first steps of their quest to return to their origins… the almost-mythical city of Khatovar, across the equator and nearly seven thousand miles of marching from the Lady’s tower at Charm.
Disaster. Betrayed by the rulers of Taglios at the very gates of the Glittering Plain, betrayed again as those few surviving members of the Old Company are just beginning to explore the mysteries they have long sought. Only Goblin and One-Eye of the Old Company have escaped the trap, joining with their Taglian brothers to continue the battle. Water Sleeps, the Book of Sleepy, details that struggle as it takes on the quality of a guerilla war. The Black Company are but a few men in hiding, but the Black Company will neither forget their fellow soldiers trapped beneath the Glittering Plain, nor forgive the betrayals that put them there.
The Black Company opened Glen Cook’s dark military fantasy with a flood of smoke and flame. The story continues in Shadows Linger, as the Black Company begins to learn the dirty little secret the Lady left in her grave when an unwitting wizard freed her. If the Lady is a merciless, uncaring tyrant, than the Dominator cares very, very much about the betrayal that left him trapped. And not in a loving, tender sort of way.
This, the Second Book of Murgen, continues to make use of Smoke’s unusual talents to provide a broad perspective to the Annalist’s recording of events following the end of the Dejagore siege. With the Black Company reunited with its Captain in Taglios, the time for the invasion of the Shadowlands has come, and preparations are moving rapidly. The intrigue is moving rapidly as well, for the Black Company has a long memory for betrayal, and the rulers of Taglios are beginning to think that their allies may just be worse than their enemies.
Continuing the Chronicles of the Black Company, The Silver Spike tells the tale of events following the climatic clash in The White Rose . In the aftermath of that battle, the surviving core of the Black Company went one way, and the supports of the White Rose another.. leaving the soul of the Dominator imprisoned in a silver spike, buried deep in the heartwood of a sapling demigod.
But evil calls to evil, and what man’s soul is immune to the temptations of wealth and power? It is not long before four men conspire to wrest the spike free from an unwary, overconfident godling. And with the prize already in the game, every sorcerer, wizard, and dark cult will converge on the city to lay their claim.The world of men can only pray for deliverance when there are Dark Powers on the field…
After the events in Shadow Games left the Black Company with neither of its commanding officers, with Dreams of Steel covering the consequences of that loss, Bleak Seasons (the Book of Murgen, and the first book of Glittering Stone) picks up the story of the majority of the surviving Company – those who made it into the walls of Dejagore.
The tale is disjointed in space and time, as the narrator is subject to hallucinatory fits that drag his mind to other times and other places. Some of that is the result of facing a long, horrific siege under awful conditions; but some may be the result of supernatural forces. The resulting three narrative threads can sometimes make the story hard to follow on first reading, and force an emotional distance upon the reader (one that, interestingly enough, matches the narrator’s desire to keep his own mental distance from his experiences during the siege).