Shadowplay

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Those wishing the full story of my gratitude should inspect the “thank-you-all” page in Shadowmarch. Nothing much has changed with the second volume.

Or those who don’t have Volume One to hand: As always, many thanks to my editors Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert and everyone else at DAW Books, my wife Deborah Beale and our assistant Dena Chavez, and my agent Matt Bialer, and also my pets and children, who make every day a challenge and an adventure. (And whoever did good work without being challenged?) Last of all, another shout-out to the folks at Shadowmarch.com. You are welcome to join us there. You don’t even have to bring booze or anything. (It’s a virtual community, after all.)

For those who wish to feel securely grounded in the Who, What, and Where of things, there are several maps and, at the end of the book, indexes of characters and places and other important materials.

The maps have been compiled from an exhaustive array of traveler’s tales, nearly illegible old documents, transcripts of oracular utterances, and the murmurings of dying hermits, not to mention the contents of an ancient box of land-office records discovered at a Syannese flea market. A similarly arcane and wearying process was responsible for the creation of the indexes. Use them well, remembering that many have died, or at least seriously damaged their vision and scholarly reputations, to make these aids available to you, the reader.

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