Kina
From Glen Cook Wiki
Kina is the goddess that the outlawed Stranglers, or Deceivers, worship by murder. She is revered and feared in the deep south, around Taglios. She usually appears in dreams and visions as an ebony-black female figure a hundred feet tall with four arms and six breasts; her head is hairless and oblong, and her mouth is filled with vampire-like fangs. She wears a necklace of baby skulls and a necklace of severed penises. She is more generally known as Khadi, a more 'acceptable' name; she is also called Patwa, Kompara, Bhomahna, and other names. Her true appearance is that of a gigantic, purple-black woman with perfect proportions, her skin marred by ten thousand scars.
History
According to her legend, Kina was created by the gods of light to combat the forces of darkness; she represents entropy and chaos. She ate so many demons and become so filled with wickedness and power that the gods were then forced to team up with the demons to defeat her. She sleeps imprisoned and awaits the return of her messiah, the Daughter of Night, who will free her and enable her to bring about the apocalyptic Year of the Skulls.
Whatever her origins - Shivetya suggests she may have started as a mortal creature like the Dominator (he refers to her as a "Drin") - she did apparently wage war across the Glittering Plain and was imprisoned in the fortress with Shivetya as her guardian. Kina reaches out to the Lady, seeking to use her to create the Daughter of Night. Lady does give birth to a girl who turns out to be Kina's messiah, but in the process Lady finds a way to steal power from Kina, using Kina's magic to replace her own lost powers.
Kina may be immortal, and capable of planning over decades, but she is somewhat constrained by southern Taglios culture; Lady says Kina is "not that bright" and didn't realize that her attempted seduction of Lady was misguided, or that Lady was stealing her power until it was too late to stop her. Kina is also unable to react quickly to events, a fact which proves fatal as Croaker and Goblin succeed in sneaking up on her sleeping form and killing her with One-Eye's magic Black Spear.
Real-life references
The goddess Kina seems closely related to the Hindu goddess Kali, or Kali Ma. In particular, the iconography of Kali Ma is extremely similar to that of Kina, as described in Dreams of Steel. Her worshippers, the Stranglers, resemble real-world Thuggees from the 13th to the 19th century. Articles from Wikipedia states that the Thuggees was a hereditary cult with both Muslim and Hindu members that practiced large-scale robbery and murder of travellers by strangulation, as sacrifices to Kali. The Thuggees were broken up by the British, to which we might draw parallels to The Black Company.
