(from inside jacket) "In The Arm of the Stone, Victoria Strauss has created a reality of two worlds: Handpower, based on technology, and Mindpower, in which tools are regarded as dangerous heresy. A thousand years ago, when the worlds split apart, an ambitious sorcerer seized the Stone from which the powers of mind are drawn. To keep the new world from contamination, he established rigid rules circumscribing which machines may be built and what types of knowledge may be pursued-rules brutally enforced by an order of Guardians known as the Arm of the Stone. . . ."
