The Black Company / Shadows Linger / The White Rose

This omnibus collects the first three Black Company novels — The Black Company, Shadows Linger, and The White Rose — chronicling the mercenary company's final days serving the Syndic of Beryl, their fateful new contract with the sorceress Soulcatcher, and their brutal campaigns across the Sea of Torments into the Lady's Empire, culminating in the sprawling Battle at Charm. Croaker, the Company's physician and Annalist, narrates most of the arc, recording history even as he loses himself in it.

As the Company buries its doubts along with its dead, prophecy stirs: the White Rose, an incarnation of good reborn to oppose the Lady's darkness, is said to walk somewhere in the world. Glen Cook's Books of the North reinvented military fantasy with morally compromised soldiers as protagonists rather than knights and wizards.