First, let me say that this series ranks way high on my list of most favorite scifantasy stories.  I love the good guys, the bad guys, the dance of intention/information, wow!  Everytime a new book comes out, I reread several of the older ones.  But darn it, the map doesn't rank anywhere near the story.

Okay, the map is really pretty, I like the shading, font & illustrations of Marat & Canem.  It is very visually pleasing at first glance.  I also really like having it, I had everything pictured backwards (the west is always the frontier to me, but jeez, that's because I grew up in the West!)  But speaking as a geologist, it always surprises me how many authors/illustrators make dumb maps.  Honestly, pick up a real map & then do some splicing or have the map checked by someone who thinks about stuff like gravity & glaciation & plate techtonics!

Most of the time they do bad things with water.  That is this map's problem.  Rivers start in topography, not in the flats.  They can bisect topography (ie canyon) but that's hard to do realistically at this scale.  Rivers that come from mountains have speed, they don't tend to build the Mississippi style delta that you see coming out of Kalare.  Those tend to happen with lower relief, bigger drainage rivers like, well, the Mississippi (maybe the Gaul could have ended that way, or the Tiber).  Lakes are also pretty rare in real geography--think about it, they are either in the mountains (glaciation) or they are reservoirs (man made).  Okay, the Great Lakes of North America aren't in a very mountainous region, but they are glacier made.  Unless a lake is important to the story, I'd say skip it, as they are really hard to get right. 

The Calderon valley looks weird in the big map, although they put in a bunch of hill/mountain symbols in the blow up.  That makes it better but it would have been even better to have the Redhill Heights range trend that way. 

Sorry to be so picky, but when you soak in all the great attention to detail in the words & plot line, it wrenches to see lack of detail in the map.