Shadows Linger

Shadows Linger was released in October 1984 and is the second novel in Glen Cook's Black Company series. It is the second of the books sometimes grouped as the Books of the North.

The series follows an elite mercenary unit, the Black Company, and it combines epic and dark fantasy in its account of what soldiers do for the powers that hire them. The Lady, the company's employer in this book, had helped her husband, the Dominator, forge and rule an evil empire with the aid of the Ten Who Were Taken, powerful wizards he had overcome and turned into his servants. The White Rose eventually defeated them, though she was not able to kill any of them and could only bury and imprison them in the Barrowlands. After many years the Lady tricked a foolish wizard into freeing her, released the Taken, and betrayed the Dominator by leaving him imprisoned. The company is ordered to march thousands of miles across her empire to the Barrowland, and the small detachment that includes its doctor and historian is at the centre of what happens in the city along the way.

Cook writes the series from inside the unit, with the company's own chronicle serving as the narrative, which keeps the great events of the world at a distance from the people fighting in them. The series continues in The White Rose, in which the company and the Lady have to deal with what has been buried in the Barrowland.