Shadow Games

Shadow Games is a fantasy novel by the American writer Glen Cook, published in 1989 and the fourth book of the Black Company series.

The company of the title is a mercenary unit that has been fighting for a few of the four hundred years it claims as its history, and after the events at the Barrowlands it is down to seven men and looking for a road south. The first stage of the journey takes them through the remains of the empire that the Lady once ruled and into the Company's own past, since the annals that record it are recovered along the way. Further south they are taken on by the crown prince of Taglios, whose problem is that the Shadowmasters are taking the lands around him one by one, and whose treasury is thinner than his ambitions. The novel is the first of the Books of the South, and it moves the series away from the northern wars towards a different enemy and a different kind of campaign.

Cook served in the United States Navy before he began writing, and the Black Company books are built around the ordinary business of a unit at war.