

All of those narrators are Black Company Annalists except for Case. The other narrators are: an outsider named Case in The Silver Spike Croaker's wife Lady in Dreams of Steel Croaker's male protégé Murgen in Bleak Seasons and She Is the Darkness and, a brilliant female newcomer nicknamed Sleepy in Water Sleeps. Six of the 11 novels and 8 of the 9 short stories are narrated by a prominent central character, a physician and historian called Croaker. The whole thing is about the Company and the idea of the Company: the thing that is bigger than the sum of its parts.
Croaker is a central character throughout the series always was, always will be. There are people who go on, last through a number of books, sometimes they die, and sometimes they come back to life. The hero, or the protagonist, whatever, of the Black Company series is the Company. Glen Cook explicitly states that the protagonist of the series is the Black Company brotherhood itself: While the Black Company itself is the protagonist of the series, Croaker is its most prominent individual character. Novels from this series have been translated from the original English into at least 17 languages: see the Black Company series/Cover gallery for a showcase of the Black Company's international publication history. While the most recent novel, the interquel Port of Shadows, does take place chronologically during the Books of the North, it is omitted from that arc both because it was published about 33 years later and because it is a "lost history"-style narrative. The first 10 novels are organized by three story arcs: the 3 Books of the North the 3 Books of the South and the 4 Books of Glittering Stone. The series consists of 11 novels, 5 stand-alone short stories (the On The Long Run story arc), and 4 pre-publication short stories that were later incorporated as chapters in subsequent novels. It chronicles key events of the most recent ~40 years of the long history of a brotherhood of mercenaries called the Black Company, the last of the legendary Free Companies of Khatovar. The Black Company series is a dark fantasy series written by Glen Cook.

4 Timeline order (in-universe chronological).
