Pitless Rain Books in Order

Pitless Rain is the banner here for Glen Cook’s new Black Company arc, officially titled A Pitiless Rain or The Orphan’s Tale. Set after the events of Soldiers Live, it picks up the Annals in a world where the Company has crossed the plain of glittering stone and reality itself seems to have shifted. Veteran readers can expect familiar names, but the focus tilts toward the next generation.

In the opening volume Lies Weeping, the Company retreats through a shadowgate toward its old refuge in Hsien, the Land of Unknown Shadows. They hope for breathing room and instead find suspicious warlords and a city that remembers the age of the Shadowmasters all too well. The Lady, no longer the all-powerful empress of the North, ages backwards and struggles to shake off lingering magical constraints. Croaker, now ascended as the Steadfast Guardian, remains behind in a nameless fortress, watching over everything at a god’s remove.

On the ground in Hsien, Arkana and Shukrat step into the role of Annalists, writing the Company’s history while trying to survive it. What looks at first like routine garrison duty turns strange as they uncover buried secrets, new kinds of sorcery, and plots that treat the Company as both threat and prize. Later volumes promise to follow these "wild witches" and their comrades deeper into the Land of Unknown Shadows and farther from anything Croaker’s generation would recognize.

Cook has described the arc as part family saga, part hard fantasy experiment. The books lean into the idea of the Company as a found family whose children and spiritual heirs have to decide what parts of that legacy to keep. At the same time, the stakes stay high: demigods with fraying humanity, old Taken still scheming, and forces on Hsien that might rival anything on the plain of glittering stone.

This series_background is meant to situate Pitless Rain within the larger Chronicles, explain why Hsien matters, and prepare you for a story that is as much about inheritance and change as it is about battles and contracts.