The land that knows no iron. Here people ride horses and carriages, use no electricity and have almost no knowledge of firearms, while aviators take wooden gliders into the air. There are no states familiar to us here - there is the heir to the Roman Empire, a gigantic Power that captured almost all of Europe, the ruler of the entire East, the Ottoman Empire, the gigantic Russian-Tatar Russian Khanate and China, which always stands apart. The greatest treasure of this strange world is the mysterious magical Word, which can transfer any object to a parallel space, where it will be stored until the owner (or the one who lured the Word from him by force or cunning) needs to remove it. For the secret of the Word they die and kill, they go to any meanness and betrayal. But what kind of power of the Word should the boy Marcus have if the best agents of the Power are trying to capture or destroy him? This is the question that haunts Marcus’s only friend and protector, the brave “noble thief” Ilmar...