The Black Company

The Black Company is a fantasy novel by the American writer Glen Cook, published in 1984. It is the first book of the Black Company series.

The company of the title is a mercenary unit that hires itself out to whoever will pay, and the employer it takes on here is the Lady, who has recently risen after centuries spent imprisoned. Opinion about her is divided: some hold that she stands between humankind and something worse, and others hold that she is the evil in question. The company's men are hard-bitten professionals who take their pay and carry out their orders, and their habit is to bury their doubts along with their dead rather than to settle the argument. A prophecy then changes the work: the White Rose has been reborn somewhere in the world to embody good again, and the Black Company has to find her. The novel is written as the company's own chronicle, and its narrator is the physician and annalist who keeps that record.

Cook's series follows the same unit through roughly forty years of its history and is one of the books that established the grim and morally ambiguous end of modern fantasy.