Bleak Seasons

Murgen carries the Black Company's standard and keeps its Annals. The Siege of Dejagore still weighs on him: it split the Company into his own "Old Crew" and the Nar faction under the treacherous Mogaba, and the wound has not closed.

Years on, seizures wrench Murgen's spirit out of his body and out of time. He is forced back into the horrors of the siege while the present goes on around him, so the narrative moves between two periods.

The events run alongside those told from Lady's point of view in Dreams of Steel. In the present strand, the Company keeps an uneasy alliance with the Nyueng Bao pilgrims. Tension grows with the Radisha's rule in Taglios.

Soulcatcher and the Howler remain a constant threat over all of it. This is the first volume of the Books of Glittering Stone, a fantasy series told as the fractured, time-skipping record of a mercenary company at endless war.