The story has all the hallmarks of the rest of the series: a terse but lovable protagonist, rampant unreliable narration, and extremely gritty violence and humor. Although it is not immediately apparent how they are connected, they are unsurprisingly intertwined by the end. There are two timelines in the book: one that tells the story of a necromancer from many years prior and one that tells the story of the company. The book essentially follows a huge number of the old cast, and many new characters, as they sit in this town, look for the Port, and react to things continually getting weirder. The job is to camp out in a small city and locate the “Port of Shadows”, a woman who carries the blood of “The Dominator” (an even more ancient and evil tyrant) and to stop her from conceiving a child, as this would allow The Dominator to be reborn – something The Lady is very keen to avoid. The book follows The Black Company, a group of elite mercenaries, as they do a job for The Lady – a legendary tyrant and all around Big BadTM. That being said, here is a general rundown of the plot. While I enjoyed the book (review spoilers), it is definitely not for someone unfamiliar with the full series story and I think it would make an extremely unsatisfying read for anyone who hadn’t read the other books first. Along this line, despite taking place chronologically at the start of the series I would definitely wait until you had finished all 10 other books before you read it. Port of Shadows is a hard book to review because you need a grounding in the full series to understand much of what I have to say about it. But, before I get too far ahead of myself, let me give a big general rundown of this book to help ground you.

The book takes place chronologically between books one and two in the original series, and details a side mission that The Company was tasked with while working under the Lady. And, it just got a new addition to the series: Port of Shadows. It is the grandfather of grimdark fantasy, a touching piece of fiction based on the Vietnam war, and one of our all-time favorite series. The Quill to Live kinda had a ton of success on a large thought piece on The Black Company, by Glen Cook, so it is a special series to us (which can be found here, and I highly recommend you read our original piece instead if you are unfamiliar with this series). Oh boy, oh boy, a new Black Company book.

Port of shadows black company