Most readers will quickly realize that the city of Sivira is based on the real world city of Venice, which I visited shortly before I wrote this book. The idea was already in my first draft, and after seeing the fantasy-like city, I expanded its role significantly. The “pirate town”, as I described it then, is filled with a panoply of exotic denizens, including people and dinosaurs. Seen here is a nodosaurus, being taken for a walk by a character that happens to own the tavern that forms the backdrop. (The sign above the archway reads Judge and Jury.) The bird is just a bird, one of countless birds that lived in the late Cretaceous. I couldn’t even decide which since there are so many. I felt it important to show a bird in my story, since there is a great deal of misconception regarding birds and dinosaurs—at least dinosaurs of the Late Cretaceous. In truth, much more time separated the first birds from dinosaurs such as velociraptor than separates the velociraptor from us. By the time this story takes place, birds had been birds for nearly a hundred million years.

This is the first appearance in any illustration of Ivanno, partly because I had no convenient place to show him in the first novel, and partly because I wanted to keep him to myself a while longer. His appearance was difficult for my to pin down, but after much work, I can say that this is definitely how he appears in my mind, at least in his walking-around form.