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Lies Weeping: A Review

When I first encountered Glen Cook’s The Chronicles of the Black Company, I was fresh out of college and working at Borders (it was 2010, and the economy was garbage, and it was the only work I could get, despite a degree in technical writing). I found the original ten of Cook’s fantasy novels (published between 1984 and 2000) in large paperback omnibus editions, and I was immediately entranced by the cover art and the premise of a mercenary band roaming across a fantasy empire and struggling to survive against all odds. It would be over a decade before I managed to sit down with them, and at the time I was unaware that Glen Cook was not only still alive but also still writing, continuing the adventures of Croaker, Goblin, One-Eye, Lady, and all the others. I recently had the opportunity to go through the audiobook versions of the entire series in anticipation of the release of Lies Weeping, a new volume set after the events of Soldiers Live.

The Black Company as it was is no more. Soulcatcher and her forces were finally defeated, and Taglios was freed from her rule. The heroes who were trapped beneath the Plain of Glittering Stone were freed to participate in the final battle, and many were lost in the struggle. Now the Company is lead by Suvrin, who had once served as Sleepy’s lieutenant. They have returned from Taglios, through the Shadowgate into Hsien, to the outpost known as An Abode of Ravens. Taking over as co-annalists are Arkana and Shukrat, two young women from the world known to the company as Khatovar who were taken in by Croaker and Lady. Lady herself remains with the company, but with the defeat of the goddess Kina, her magic is greatly diminished once again. Shukrat and Arkana may bicker over how best to maintain Croaker’s legacy with the Company’s annals, but they’re still working together. Croaker himself is no longer with the Company, having taken the role once held by the demon Shivetya as the guardian of the Plain of Glittering Stone. Now with his burgeoning omniscience, he can monitor all the comings and goings of his loved ones back and forth through time, even when his physical form is still bound to the throne beneath the Plain.

Things are not quite what they all seem at An Abode. Packs of roving monkeys are threatening the Company’s food supply as winter approaches. Strange spirits appear to be haunting Tobo, the Company’s primary mage and friend of the Unknown Shadows. Arkana and Shukrat have spotted an old man wandering about near the outpost, and of all the impossible things, he looks like Croaker. Lady, meanwhile, is crafting a plan to try to restore her daughter, Booboo, to a level of health and sanity she had never in her short life possessed. The only hints anyone has received have been in the form of mysterious notes posted about An Abode, and the whispered phrase “Lies Weeping.”

Glen Cook is launching a new continuation of The Chronicles of the Black Company, with Lies Weeping being the first novel in a A Pitiless Rain. He’s deftly weaving together his original novels with his more recent work like Port of Shadows. Arkana and Shukrat serve as our primary narrators in this book, with amendments by a young man named Dikken in interstitial chapters. This book strikes me as a fine addition to the series that I’ve come to love so much in recent months. My utmost thanks to Tor Books and Netgalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review. Lies Weeping came out last Tuesday, 11/4/25. If you’re a Black Company fan, you should snag this one ASAP. If you’re not yet a fan, now’s as good a time to start as any.

Silence

In the dark there’s nothing but me
And my thoughts of what could
Have been,
And my anxiety and fear of what
Will be,
And my desires and my needs
And my tears.
It’s too much for any one person
To bear
But I know that you too carry
The weight
And so
In the dark there’s nothing but me
And silence.

The Door

The door was locked. It had been for as long as I could remember, and it would probably remain so until the day that I died. Maybe even longer than that. It wasn’t that I couldn’t unlock the door to find out what she had hidden away so carefully. It was that I made a promise.

The door stood at the far end of the hallway from the room where I slept. I didn’t sleep in my bedroom anymore at that point. It seemed futile to try to fall asleep in that bed after she was gone. No, the room where I now slept, where I had been sleeping for nearly ten years now, was my study. The overstuffed recliner next to the fireplace served as a better bed for me, and I had lost count of how many times I had nodded off while a fire roared to counter the howling wind and snow outside of my windows.

The door led to a room that had been intended as a nursery, but the children had never come. One day she had gone into the room, and stayed there for several hours. When she came out, her face was pale, but filled with grim accomplishment. She locked the door then, and made me swear to never open it again. She threw the key into the fire that night, and we sat together in the recliner and watched as it melted away.

For a time, we were happy again, and we ignored the door at the far end of the hallway next to the bedroom, when the bed was still shared and we didn’t need the fire to stay warm. The door stayed locked, and I never asked her the reason. We trusted each other with every secret but this one, and it eventually drove us apart.

I don’t remember exactly what happened on the day (or night, I can’t seem to recall the hour) when she left. I don’t know where she went, but I know why. The locked door seemed to torment her more than me, a reminder of the life that she couldn’t carry. I want to say that I plead with her that night, got down on my knees and begged her to tell me what was eating away at her, what this secret was, but I don’t know. I may have, instead, filled my heart with courage from an increasingly empty bottle and told her that if she couldn’t live with herself then she couldn’t live with me, and that she needed to get out.

I don’t remember when it was that I took every one of my books and my lamps and my blankets and my pillows from the room that had been ours and left every one of hers behind. I haven’t been back in that bedroom for years, but I’ve left it unlocked. I can’t risk doing what she did. I can’t leave the house, either. That’s not to say that I can’t go out my door to buy groceries or to find a new book, but I can’t move. I can’t pack up and find somewhere new to live. I’m held here by my promise to her. If someone else were to buy the house, they might open the locked door, and I cannot bear the thought of some stranger learning the secret that tore her away from me.

The door sits at the end of the hallway, on the second floor of my home. My kitchen is directly beneath the room, and some days I find myself staring at the ceiling in wonder. What-if’s fill my head, and I find that I lose my appetite until the next day, when another empty bottle of whiskey or rum or vodka has turned up next to my recliner and I have no memory of coming back upstairs. One morning, I woke up on the floor of the hallway next to the locked door, a screwdriver and a hammer beside me. I must have decided that I had to open the door, but I had passed out before I could put my plan into action.

It’s better that way, really. I don’t want to know what’s behind that door, or at least that’s what I tell myself. Instead I sit next to the fire, or at my desk, and I read, or I write, or I try to do one or the other and fail miserably at both because I remember how much she used to inspire me and remember that she’s gone and she’s not coming back. Occasionally a magazine calls and asks me if I can finish another story for them this month, and I tell them yes, because I still need to eat.

Once in a while, I thought about having a new key made, or having a locksmith come in and open the door, but I realized that would still be breaking my promise, and even now I am still a man of my word. I know what I’m going to do now, though. I’m not going to break my promise to her. I’m not going to unlock the door. I’m going to stoke the fire high tonight, and I’m going to leave my chair closer to it than usual. I’m going to have a drink, and I’m going to fall asleep, surrounded by my books and covered in an afghan that she made for me the winter after I proposed, one of the blankets that I took from our old bedroom after she left. I’m not going to leave a note. It wouldn’t survive anyway. I suppose that the fire will start slowly, kissing the pages of the books, blackening them and turning them to ash. It will start in the study, and make its way down the hall.

It will consume everything in its path. It’s fire, after all, and it will devour the house that was once ours and is now mine and mine alone. The hallway will offer little resistance. Likewise the bedroom we once shared and I now shun. It will burn, and the smoke alarms will attempt to wake me to save me from myself, but it will be in vain. The locked door will stand at the end of the hall, but it too will burn, and her secret will die with me.