She Is The Darkness
Book Two of Glittering Stone: A Novel of the Black Company
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Glen Cook's She is the Darkness is the second book in the fast-paced Glittering Stone military fantasy series.
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.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although an intelligent fantasy, this second volume of Cook's Glittering Stone trilogy (after Bleak Seasons) will be tough going for those unfamiliar with the preceding tales about the mercenary Black Company (of which this is the seventh). In it, narrator Murgen--annalist, narrator, ghostwalker--discovers that his wife and newborn son are alive. Meanwhile, an impressive host of demigods, demons, sorcerers, assassins and unclassifiable entities led by the goddess Kina (Kali in disguise) and by Soulcatcher--sister to Lady, the wife of Croaker, the commander of the Black Company--array themselves against the Company. At the cliffhanger ending, Croaker is led into folly that threatens the Company's existence. Cook deserves high marks for much in this novel, including the gritty realism of the soldiers' dialogue and of the attitude of the civilians (who seem to suffer much like the Vietnamese did during the Vietnam War) toward the warriors rampaging over their towns and fields. The distinctively non-Western flavor of much of the mythology is also welcome. Large parts of the book read like a collaboration between Michael Moorcock and the late John Masters, dean of historical novels of the British Raj. Indeed, the book offers virtually anything a fantasy reader could ask for, except a coherent narrative that stands on its own.
