To make a list in the acknowledgments of a book is to say, I know my debts. And the truth is, I don’t, not even half of them. For every great idea that I can trace to an actual person, to a specific conversation over beers, there are scores, hundreds of wonderful thoughts that people—some friends, some utter strangers, some in writing, some in casual conversation—have laid into my arms like little babies.

I’ve raised these ideas as though they were mine, tried to take good care of them, tucked them tight between the covers of this book. Some of them have lived with me a long time, and I’ve grown incredibly fond of them, possessive even, so much so that it takes the occasion of this formal acknowledgment to tell the truth: I don’t know where they all came from.

Now, as they head back out into the world, I like to imagine that although they might be frightened at first, they will grow increasingly delighted at the sheer size of it all, the color, the freedom, that they might recognize the majesty of the place they came from. The world is so much larger than one writer’s mind, and though these ideas have lived with me awhile, I was never their final home.

First published 2015 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

First published in the UK 2015 by Tor

This electronic edition published 2014 by Tor

an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Basingstoke and Oxford

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ISBN 978-0-230-77044-7

Copyright © Brian Staveley, 2015

Map artwork by Isaac Stewart

The right of Brian Staveley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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