The Silver Spike

The Silver Spike is a fantasy novel by the American writer Glen Cook, published in 1989, and a spin-off from the Black Company series.

The book follows what happens to the people who did not go south with the company. The Dominator, a wizard too powerful to be killed, had his remaining essence imprisoned in a silver spike, and the stories of what the spike can do have made it the object of a contest: some want to steal it, some want to destroy it and others want to be sure that nobody gets it at all. Among the people caught up in that are two former members of the company and Darling, who was once the White Rose, and who has her own reasons for wanting the thing gone. Cook tells the story through a collection of characters with their own quarrels, and it runs alongside the earlier novels rather than continuing the march south.

The book appeared in the same year as Shadow Games, and it fills in what was happening in the north while the company was travelling south in search of the place its annals describe.