"Tad Williams - Shadowmarch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Tad)

Tad Williams


Shadowmarch
This book is dedicated to my children, Connor Williams and Devon Beale, who as I write this are still small but
extremely powerful. They amaze me every day.


Someday, when they are grown and their mother and I have ambled on to the Fields Beyond, I hope the two of them
will be warmed by the knowledge of how fiercely we loved them, and a tiny bit embarrassed by how wickedly they took
advantage of it, charming, funny little buggers that they are.
No book is written without help, and few authors need as much help as I do, so . . . on with the parade of gratitude!


Many thanks, as always, to my fabulous wife, Deborah Beale, for her unfailing support and brilliant help and
discerning reader’s eye, and to my most excellent agent Matt Bialer, for having my back when the quibbles are flying.


Thanks also to our talented assistant, Dena Chavez, who keeps Deborah and I as close to sane as we are ever likely to
get, in part by immense organizational skill, in part by preventing my beloved children from helping me too much when
I really need to finish something.


My overseas editors, Tim Holman in the UK and Dr. Ulrike Killer in Germany, have been big supporters of my work and
give me a great deal of confidence with all the projects I undertake. They have my overwhelming gratitude, too.


And of course all my friends at DAW Books—who also (conveniently!) happen to be my American
publishers—including Debra Euler, Marsha Jones, Peter Stampfel, Betsy Wollheim, and Sheila Gilbert, cannot escape
much vigorous thank-ification. Betsy and Sheila have been my editors and partners-in-crime since I started on this wild
book-writing endeavor twenty years ago, and the more years that pass, the more I come to realize what a great gift that
has been and how lucky I am. Thanks, guys. We’ve had fun, huh?


Last but not least, I must also mention that this particular book owes a huge debt of gratitude and inspiration to all the
mad, wonderful folk on the Shadowmarch.com bulletin board, a repository of wisdom, support, silliness, and recipes
for rhubarb like no other. Thanks for Shadowmarch (the online project) are especially due to Josh Milligan and the
incomparable Matt Dusek, the latter still helming the site as Tech Wizard in Residence. I hope many of you new
readers will come and join us—I spend a lot of time kibitzing on the board there, and I’d enjoying meeting you.
 Author s Note

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 complied from an exhaustive array of traveler’s tales, nearly illegible old documents, transcripts of
oracular utterances, and the murmunngs 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.