THESE BOOKS KEEP BEING GREAT ( )

These next two books in this series are a wild ride full of drops, twists and turns. I initially balked at having a new narrator, but that didn’t last long. I liked Murgen and he continued to grow on me as I went. He’s a great character, a farmer who ended up with the Black Company as Annalist and Standardbearer. He’s resourceful, sarcastic, sensitive and a little messed up.

This story threw me in the beginning. Murgen has this mysterious ability to leave his body and jump around in time-space, and this was used to convey history and events in other places, including the whereabouts of Croaker’s and the Lady’s child, who was snatched away two books ago. It was confusing because there was no warning when Murgen would drop out and it wasn’t always clear when and where things were happening, let alone why. His own personal traumas were mixed up in it, too. In retrospect, this was well done because I had this constant, shadowy feeling that I wasn’t where I thought I was, and that’s how Murgen felt. On top of this, things were stalking him in the ghost world. Eventually this phenomenon was explained—and then he found other ways to “ghostwalk” as he called it, which helped bring the story to ground a bit. When he gained the ability to control it, and to do it on his own, things got really interesting.

The usual host of colorful, wicked characters abound, including Soulcatcher, Longshadow, Howler and Kina, who continues to be an unnerving force operating in the shadows with a particularly nasty agenda. Croaker’s and the Lady’s child becomes one of the creepiest characters of all—not the closure I was thinking might happen on that, but it sure kept things going. There was also a raft of intriguing questions pulling the story along, things that seemed small but weren’t; and other things that downright made no sense until it came together at the end in an epic crash that left me wanting more. As usual. ( )

not a bad continuation from the first 5 books in the series, but not as vibrant either. Croaker is again narrating the story in parts and his "voice" has changed. Good story line but somehow it lacks the richness and originality of earlier books. ( )

"Dreams too easily become nightmares." ( )

4 stars and more. Books 7 & 8 of the Black Company series; Books 1 & 2 of the Glittering Stone 4-book subseries. i read Water Sleeps, Book 9, first, tsk, because that's the way it came to hand. this is a marvelous series, and the writing in it just keeps getting better and better. Murgen is currently the annalist for the Black Company, and Croaker as the previous holder of that post complains herein that his PoV is too personal, but Murgen is half Croaker's second and half a walker through a spirit world of deities and magic, which makes the contrast between the mundane and bloody details of keeping an army on the move and the evanescent and deadly machinations of various forces around them, seen through a veil, create a striking and kind of indelible world of vivid personalities, treachery, full of alien landscapes and tribes described with unexpected beauty. i came to this series via Steven Erikson's wonderfully complex Malazan Book of the Fallen series, because Erikson always cites this one as his biggest inspiration. in this one the narrative is more linear and simpler to follow, though in both the past, present, and future are always colliding, but the mashup of magic, horror, and time, conveyed through a cast of thousands of vivid personalities, mythologies, and companies in a mercenary army on the move across a world is very much the same. lovely stuff, both series, and together the best military fantasies ever. ( )