Book Description
The wind whines and howls with bitter breath. Lightning snarls and barks. Rage is an animate force upon the plain of glittering stone. Even shadows are afraid.

At the heart of the plain stands a vast grey stronghold, unknown, older than any written memory. One ancient tower has collapsed across the fissure. From the heart of the fastness comes a great deep slow breath like that of a slumbering world-heart, cracking the olden silence.

Death is eternity. Eternity is stone. Stone is silence.

Stone cannot speak but stone remembers.

So begins the next movement of Glittering Stone....

The tale again comes to us from the pen of Murgen, Annalist and Standard Bearer of the Black Company, whose developing powers of travel through space and time give him a perspective like no other.

Led by the wily commander, Croaker, and the Lady, the Company is working for the Taglian government, but neither the Company nor the Taglians are overflowing with trust for each other. Arrayed against both is a similarly tenuous alliance of sorcerers, including the diabolical Soulcatcher, the psychotic Howler, and a four-year-old child who may be the most powerful of all.



About the Author
Born in 1944, Glen Cook grew up in northern California, served in the U.S. Navy, attended the University of Missouri, and was one of the earliest graduates of the well-known "Clarion" workshop SF writers. Since 1971 he has published a large number of SF and fantasy novels, including the "Dread Empire" series, the occult-detective "Garrett" novels, and the very popular "Black Company" sequence that began with the publication of The Black Company in 1984. Among his SF novels is A Passage at Arms.

After working many years for General Motors, Cook now writes full-time. He lives near St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife Carol.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The tale comes to us from the pen of Murgen, Annalist and Standard Bearer of the Black Company, whose developing powers of travel through space and time give him a perspective like no other. Led by the wily commander, Croaker, and the Lady, the Company is working for the Taglian government, but neither the Company nor the Taglians are overflowing with trust for each other. Arrayed against both is a similarly tenuous alliance of sorcerers, including the diabolical Soulcatcher, the psychotic Howler, and a four-year-old child who may be the most powerful of all.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews

Second book in the current trilogy (Bleak Stones, 1996), and eighth overall, about the Black Company, a band of mercenary warriors attempting to survive in a world of contending sorcerers, gods, ghosts, assassins, and whatnot. Once again the Company (the Old Man, the Lady, One-Eye the sorcerer, the standard-bearer and narrator Murgen, and so on) battle a rival faction of cannibals and devil-worshippers, distracting them from their real enemy, the Shadowmaster Soulcatcher and her hordes of Stranglers—whose evil plots unfold against a landscape so bleak and blasted by war and magic that readers can't help but wonder where, for instance, the Company's food comes from, or who can afford to pay them. Fascinating, no doubt, for the fans; all but impenetrable to outsiders.