A road leading from Shantarsk to Chelyabinsk is buried under snow. A wagon train with goods moves slowly through the taiga. Several merchants with trading interests and Cossacks with gold, a master of history, and two “black” barbarian-archaeologists, a Japanese diplomat with an interpreter, and a village priest.
Ordinary people, an ordinary well-worn road. But this time the journey will turn into a meeting with something mysterious and unknowable to our material world. It all begins when the main hero, lieutenant Saveliev, and everyone traveling with the wagon train suddenly loses all golden items—crosses, coins, pieces of orders, and parts of clocks. Theories about thieves lead nowhere. Then the horses die, the wagon drivers die; a strange golden creature appears, that keeps following the convoy without stopping, and there are inexplicable dreams.