Black Company Wiki
Register
Advertisement
Black Company Wiki

The Paingod was a sorcerer of high magnitude who became the tyrant of the city of Cho'n Delor on the southern continent two hundred years before Croaker's Books of the North. He was a prominent figure in the old history of the Black Company as one of its earliest-recalled employers.

History[]

Very little is detailed about the Paingod, but he was at the epicenter of the Pastel Wars, a maelstrom of bloodshed and death that rocked a heavily-populated region along the great river above the Second Cataract. He hired the Black Company, which at the time numbered more than 6,000 soldiers, to fight for him against his rivals, the Triplet Cities. The Paingod may have been responsible for the aurora-like ribbons of lethal sorcery after which the Pastel Wars were apparently named.

During the Black Company's service to the Paingod, four different Annalists (Lees, Agrip, Holm, and Straw) wrote their histories of the events in the Book of Kette, one of the books of the Company's Annals.

After many battles, the Black Company was either defeated or betrayed, Cho'n Delor fell, and the Paingod was overthrown and presumably killed. Stories heard by Cordy Mather 200 years later would claim that the people of the Triplet Cities "sacrificed themselves" to defeat the Paingod. This account is plausible because a similar event, many untold centuries before the Paingod, took place in the northern continent wherein thousands died to contain another vastly powerful tyrant sorcerer beneath Father Tree.

When the Paingod was defeated, Cho'n Delor and all three of the Triplet Cities (Odd the First, Odd the Second, and Odd the Third) were reduced to ruins. The land on the east bank (Cho'n Delor and its surroundings) were scarred and haunted, with even animals keeping away. Hundreds of years later, the residents of a bizarre waterfront city called Idon on the opposite bank still lived in fear of the ruins of the Paingod's former city.

The Black Company[]

About two centuries after the Paingod's defeat, Croaker read to his Company brothers at Lords from Straw's Annals regarding their service to the Paingod.

Shadow Games[]

Croaker spent some hours exploring the ruins of the Paingod's fallen city, Cho'n Delor, in Shadow Games. This was one part of his trek backwards through the Black Company's past.

Advertisement