Glen Cook - A Fortress in Shadow

A Fortress in Shadow 2007 by Glen Cook
This edition of A Fortress in Shadow 2008 by Night Shade Books
Jacket art 2007 by Raymond Swanland
Jacket design by Claudia Noble
Interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen
All rights reserved
"Introduction" 2007 by Steven Erikson
The Fire in His Hands 1984 by Glen Cook
With Mercy Toward None 1985 by Glen Cook
ISBN 10: 1-59780-100-3
ISBN 13: 978-1-59780-100-3
Night Shade Books
Please visit us on the web at
http://www.nightshadebooks.com

Other books by Glen Cook

The Heirs of Babylon
The Swordbearer
A Matter of Time
The Dragon Never Sleeps
The Tower of Fear
Sung in Blood
Dread Empire
A Cruel Wind
(Containing A Shadow of All Night Falling,
October's Baby and All Darkness Met)
The Wrath of Kings (Containing Reap the East Wind and
An Ill Fate Marshalling, and
Wrath of Kings)
An Empire Unacquainted with Defeat (Short fiction collection)
Starfishers
Shadowline
Starfishers
Stars' End
Darkwar
Doomstalker
Warlock
Ceremony
The Black Company
The Black Company
Shadows Linger
The White Rose
The Silver Spike
Shadow Games
Dreams of Steel
Bleak Seasons
She Is the Darkness
Water Sleeps
Soldiers Live
The Garrett Files
Sweet Silver Blues
Bitter Gold Hearts
Cold Copper Tears
Old Tin Sorrows
Dread Brass Shadows
Red Iron Nights
Deadly Quicksilver Lies
Petty Pewter Gods
Faded Steel Heat
Angry Lead Skies
Whispering Nickel Idols
Instrumentalities of
the Night
The Tyranny of the Night
Lord of the Silent Kingdom

These were the mid-Eighties. Victoria, Vancouver Island, Canada. I was sharing a townhouse flat with Ian C. EsslemontCamdown in James Bay. We'd both dropped the academic half of careers in archaeology to pursue the dream of writing and were enrolled in the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Victoria. Our longstanding friendship was characterized by the convergence of interests, but not always and not in everything, especially what each of us was in the habit of reading.

At the time Cam was immersed in the existentialists of Europe and the magic realist writers of Latin America. I was reading Viet Nam war literature. There were instances of crossover, books and stories we thrust at each other in our enthusiasm. Going After Cacciato with its Moebius loop storytelling. Igncio Brando's And Still the Earth, a magic realist dystopic science fiction novel. We were young, still single, ballsy and ferocious in our literary passions. We were reading stuff that broke the confines of convention and this fuelled our own rather frenzied but probably feeble efforts as young writers.

For all the highfalutin pretensions of that stuff, there was something else going on at the time. We'd both grown up reading fantasy and science fiction. Again, coming at things from two very distinct directions. My earliest serious reading came with the reissue of the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs (those Frazetta covers...) by Ace and Ballantine; onward to R. E. Howard, Talbot Mundy, H. Rider Haggard, leading finally to what was for me the pinnacle of epic fantasy: Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant; for science fiction it was Leigh Brackett, Andre Norton, Asimov, Clarke, Zelazny, Harry Harrison, Ursula Le Guin.

Cam's reading list came from another planet.

Back to Victoria. In the midst of all that academic zeal, the late-night writing sessions to meet workshop deadlines, the pissing around at the university pub, the girl-chasing, Cam and I were gaming. From AD&D beginnings on to GURPS, we were busy putting our anthropology backgrounds to an entirely nonsensical use (or so it seemed at the time), fashioning a world that didn't exist but could exist (one of the reasons I have so little hair on my head these days is from tearing most of it out after purchasing the first box-set called Forgotten Realms and unfolding the huge colour map enclosedonly to find it... well, lacking in certain details relating to principles of geography, cultural anthropology, economics, etc.).

On his move out from Winnipeg, Cam had trucked along a couple boxeshis favourite books, presumablyand so, at last, we come to Glen Cook. There was plenty of beer-drinking in those days so my recollection is hazier than I'd like, but I think the first novel of Glen Cook's that Cam handed to me was The Black Company. Might have been The Starfishers. What I do recall, however, is what reading The Black Company did to me.

I was floored. Recall, we'd been reading literature that broke the rules. And I had been devouring every damned thing ever written by vets of the Viet Nam war, good and bad. Suddenly, here, in my hands, was a work of fantasy that took hold of the genre by its throat and squeezed. And even more enticing, it had the voice of the best of the Viet Nam novels I had been reading.

I'd had my fill of evil overlords, princes in shining armour, damsels whose greatest talent was screaming in perfect ascending octaves. If another novel featuring a young farmboy with secret royal bloodlines reached me I was ready to walk into the Pacific and not come back. If I saw one more Dark Lord vowing to lay waste to everything (Now why would any Dark Lord want that?) I was heading for a monastery, tonsure in tow. With but a few exceptions, it seemed that fantasy wanted to stay in the adolescent wish-fulfillment stage, where good was blindingly good and evil absurdly, comically evil. Where everyone spoke in a high diction unintentionally caricaturing something from the Middle Ages.

And then there was Glen Cook. Suddenly, there was ambivalence, there was ambiguity, suspect motivations, heroes with flaws. There were droll, often cynical points of view. There were throwaway lines that could make you howl.

This stuff. It was grown-up. It had wit. It was clever and sly. And it was dark.

I do recall descending on the various bookstores in Victoriaand thereafter wherever my archaeology work and other travels took mehunting down everything Glen Cook had written. And it wasn't easy. There was his science fictionspectacularly good, hard-bitten and complex. And there were, rare as nuggets of gold, the novels of the Dread Empire. Mystery and wonder began with the damned titles. A Shadow of All Night Falling. Reap the East Wind. With Mercy Toward None. Poetic, arcane phrases. Dark, savage lines. Into these tales I plunged, as avid a fan as any you could imagine. This was the fantasy writing I wanted to read. This was what I was looking for.

In our gaming sessions, Cam and I played the writing of Glen Cook. Not the specific details of his stories (we were too bound up in creating something unique, even then); but the sensibilitiesthe characters, their voicesand the pervasive brooding, mysterious atmosphere, the droll commentary, the penchant for outrageous understatement. Fantasy with an older voice, a wiser voice, perhaps. Fantasy with the flaws of the real world coolly, clinically transposed into a place of deadly magic, terrible wars and exhausted refugees.