Black Company
From Glen Cook Wiki
The last of the Twelve True Companies, the Free Companies of Khatovar. The Black Company is a professional band of mercenaries with a history going back four hundred years. It maintains its identity through a constantly updated history called the Annals. Its size and composition fluctuate considerably over the course of the series, but at the outset the Company is about a thousand strong, with four minor wizards and a physician (Croaker). The Company is at one point reduced to seven members. At its strongest, near the end of the series, it numbers ten thousand.
History
The true origins and purpose of the Company are not revealed until late in the series. The Company loses its Annals (and Annalist) after about a century, leaving only digests and summaries of its earliest records, and causing it to lose sight of its original mission, which was to accomplish specified military deeds and slaughters to help restore freedom to the imprisoned demon goddess Kina, aka Khadi. The original Company was entirely black, and actually originated from another world accessible via the Glittering Plain. Khatovar was a city in that world.
Black Company traditions
There are many of these, often only alluded to in the Annals - perhaps because they are known to all members. There is a traditional oath of fealty to the Company. There is also a traditional ceremony for the dead, recited with sword drawn and held before the face. The most critical tradition, from the standpoint of the Company's cohesion, is that every month the Annalist reads a selection from the Annals before the assembled Company. This is rather like a sermon, with passages chosen to inform and inspire the Company in its current situation. These traditions antedate the beginning of the series.
A pedestrian but important tradition, begun by Croaker and vigorously drummed into all new recruits for decades, is the strict observance of basic hygiene principles in camp construction, water management, waste disposal, food preparation, and medical care. These precautions, foreign to many soldiers, actually give the Company a significant edge in the field; they are able to escape many of the battlefield ailments which plague armies such as dysentery.
New traditions creep in over the course of the series. The Company receives skull-shaped badges from Soulcatcher when it signs up in the service of the Northern Empire, a sign of her patronage; two decades later, thousands of miles away from the Empire with Soulcatcher long gone and forgotten by the new members, the badges have become part of the Company uniform.
