Bleak Seasons
Bleak Seasons
The Seventh novel of The Black Company
The Books of Glittering Stone 01
By Glen Cook
Copyright © Glen Cook 1996
Cover art by Nicholas Jainschigg
First Printing: May, 1996
This 
ePub edition v1.0 by Dead^Man Jan, 2011
Incessant wind sweeps the plain. It mutters across grey pavements that sweep from horizon to horizon. It sings around scattered black pillars, a chorus of ghosts. It tumbles leaves and scatters dust come from afar. It teases the hair of a corpse that has lain undisturbed for a generation, mummifying. Impishly, the gale tosses a leaf into the cadaver’s silently screaming mouth, tugs it away again. The wind carries the breath of winter. Lightning leaps from pillar to ebon pillar like a child skittering from base to base in a game of tag. For a moment there is color on that spectral plain. The pillars might be mistaken for relics of a fallen city. They are not. They are too few and too randomly placed. Nor has a one ever fallen, though many have been gnawed deeply by the teeth of the hungry wind.
The wind blows, but nothing moves
in the place of the glittering stone.
After dark, the wind dies.
After dark, silence rules...
"Let me tell you who I am, on the chance that these scribblings do survive....
"I am Murgen, standardbearer of the Black Company, though I bear the shame of having lost that standard in battle. I am keeping these annals because Croaker is dead, One-Eye won't, and hardly anyone else can read or write. I will be your guide for however long it takes the Shadowlanders to force our present predicament to its inevitable end....
"I expect these writings to blow away on a dark wind, never to be touched by another eye. Or they might become the tinder Shadowspinner uses to light the pyre under the last man he murders after taking Dejagore....”
So begins the saga of the siege of Stormgard, the chronicle of a desperate conflict between dark sorcery and bare human courage, seen through the eyes of a war-weary, battle-scarred veteran. Spellbinding adventure on an epic scale, this is heart-stopping heroic fantasy at its finest.
1
... fragments...
... just blackened fragments, crumbling between my fingers.
Browned page corners that reveal half a dozen words in a crabbed hand, their context no longer known.
All that remains of two volumes of the Annals. A thousand hours of labor. Four years of history. Gone forever.
Or are they? I do not want to go back. I do not want to relive the horror. I do not want to reclaim the pain. There is pain too deep to withstand right here, right now. There is no way to recapture the totality of that awfulness, anyway. The mind and heart, safely over to the farther shore, simply refuse to encompass the enormity of the voyage.