shsilver, our editor, saw this lovely shot of Mount Alamut, one of the major locations in the novel, and thought that it might make a good basis for a cover. Unfortunately, it was shot by an Iranian photographer and there's that whole nasty embargo thing going on which would make licensing potentially entertaining.
At one point during the process, I went out looking for licensable images that might be used to pull a cover together. I found this for an image of the mountain and this for a skyscape. And when you pull it all together and work it over in Photoshop, you get something that looks like this:
Unfortunately, it turns out that the chances of this turning into mud in the printing process are something on the order of a hundred percent, so we're going to be doing something else. (It's amazing how much brighter things are on the screen than they are when you print them out. I loaded new cartridges into the color laser printer last night, because I really needed to see if this was going to look ok in print. It won't.)
On the other hand, I had fun doing it and I kind of like it, so I figured I'd let you all look at it.
We paid for the licenses, so somebody should. :)