Acknowledgments

 

This book could not have found its shape without the forbearance and editorial guidance of my wife, Teresa Milbrodt.

Nor could it have left the ground without the diligence and faith of Phil Jourdan, my editor, Paul Simpson, my copy editor, and the immense efforts of Marc Gascoigne, Penny Reeve, Mike Underwood, Nick Tyler, and everyone else at Angry Robot. I also owe thanks to Dominic Harman for his astounding cover artwork.

The genesis of this story, like many of my others, came from impulse reading. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, a history of 14th century Europe as told through the life of Enguerrand de Coucy. She did not stay long on the Black Death, but Barbara Tuchman is a novelist’s historian, and I could not easily forget the feelings and experiences that she so meticulously evoked. These echoed in my mind for months, until they seized and synthesized with characters and ideas that had been percolating for even longer.

From Tuchman, I leapfrogged to other works on the Black Death and more on the era, and could not have found many of them without the Gunnison Public Library and Western State Colorado University Library, or the efforts of their staff. Books important to Quietus’s development include Julie Kerr’s Life in the Medieval Cloister, John Kelly’s The Great Mortality, and many others for which I have no library records. The errors that remain are either deliberately made or my own oversight.

My professors and cohort at Bowling Green State University were as kind to me as family for tolerating me when my impulses took me far away from whatever it was I was supposed to be doing there. Osia and Ways and Means have their origins in stories delivered to their workshops.