Soldiers Live / Glen Cook

 

Soldiers Live by Glen Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Black Company carries on. Croaker and Lady are back in the picture, having been rescued from the ice cavern under the glittering plain. They are older and their joints ache, they are semi-retired, because no one truly retires from the Black Company. So no one wants to listen to them, especially Sleepy, who is Captain of the Company now. Croaker is back to being the Annalist, a job he can't seem to find a volunteer for and everyone resists being voluntold. As he says at one point, “This is what happens when you get old. You start thinking. Worse, you start telling other people what you think.”

If you've read the previous eight volumes, you can be assured that the same plot line that we've been working on for a while now keeps rolling along. Kina, the goddess of death, is still trapped and they need to figure out a way to kill her. Croaker and Lady's daughter is still Kina's puppet, the Daughter of Darkness. The Company needs to get the hell out of the Shadowlands and return to their own world to deal with Lady’s sister, Soulcatcher. They do what the Black Company does, they roll along towards these goals with planning, determination, deception, and a fair amount of luck, while trying not to trample their honour, such as it is.

When interviewed back in 2005, Cook said he had plans for two more volumes of this series, but here we are more than fifteen years later with not a whisper of a publication date. This novel seems to wrap things up reasonably well, so I'm not sure where Cook would go in a new book. Not many of the old guard that we as readers have become fond of are still active and we haven't made the acquaintance of the new officers. Possibly the two young women semi-adopted late in this book by Croaker and Lady will be the focus, if they continue to share the duties of Annalist. That could be interesting. If Cook actually produces another BC book, I'll be up for it.

Book number 418 of my Science Fiction & Fantasy Reading Project.



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