The only hope for the Company lies in discovering the Lady’s true name. The only surviving member of the original Taken, victim of several plots led by the Company, and left for dead at the end of Shadows Linger, his hatred for them is boundless. After two years of neglect, the Lady has ordered a massive assault on the Plain, surrounding it with five armies under the leadership of the Company’s greatest enemy, Limper. Now, though, even there its survival is in doubt. With the protection of the denizens of the Plain, the rebellion has survived. They say he has been here since the dawn. The scarce wild human tribesmen of the Plain worship him.

Silent, Goblin, and One-Eye have all tried to unravel his significance. There he stands, twenty feet tall and ten thick, brooding beside the creek, radiating something akin to dread, his roots planted on the geographical center of the Plain.

First or last of his kind, I do not know. From farther away came the wind-chimes tinkle of Old Father Tree. Air chuckled and whispered and murmured and whistled in the coral.

Sagey scents trickled across my nostrils. Those and lots of other strange things all bow down to the voiceless direction of Old Father Tree. The plain is an exotically magic-infused region where menhirs talk and move on their own and giant manta-like beasts fly from their roosts on the backs of thousand-foot-long windwhales. Under the leadership of Darling - revealed at the end of The Black Company to be the foretold champion, the White Rose - the rebellion consists mostly of spies scattered across the empire and a few dozen veterans holed up in caves in the middle of the Plain of Fear. Finally, jumping back in time nearly a century, Cook presents the story of Bomanz, the wizard who released the Lady and her servitors from their shackles in the first place. The second concerns the mysterious Corbie’s efforts to uncover what is happening in the Barrowlands where the Dominator, the North’s erstwhile Dark Lord and husband of the Lady, remains trapped. The foremost is Croaker’s account of the final days of the rebellion led by the White Rose against the Empire of the Lady. Taking place six years after the escape of the Black Company’s survivors in Shadows Linger, TWR contains three distinct stories. With The White Rose (1985), Glen Cook brought the original Black Company trilogy to an end.

Glen cook shadows linger