Described in the novel by Master Chen, the life of Maniakh (by the way, coming from the family of Roxana - the wife of Alexander the Great) from Samarkand, a merchant - ruler of the trading empire that controlled the Great Silk Road from China to Europe, and at the same time an intelligence officer, rather, the head of the secret service of Sogdiana - this is, of course, a dance with death and fear. “The Dance of Death is simple and terrible...” is almost correct, but this fandang of knights with a cloak (taking into account the local specifics, it would be more accurate to say a robe), a dagger and a crossbow looks simple only after the denouement. A conspiracy of necromancers against the Emperor of the Celestial Empire, a counter-conspiracy of the Prime Minister, the uprising of a disgraced commander, the betrayal of the head of the imperial intelligence service... this is only part of what our hero has to cope with. After all, his main goal is to preserve his home, a man-made flowering oasis in the sands, the “Land of Water” "- Sogdiana, from the invasion and invasion of warlike neighbors - and its neighbors are not pleasant: “warriors of the Prophet”, although split into supporters of the Umayyads and Abbasids (not without the work of Maniakh himself - more on this in the second book of the series), but by no means who have lost their aggressiveness, the hordes of the Khazar Khazars of the Great Steppe, the Bulgar kingdom, greedily reaching out for the right to control the Silk Road, the legions of the Emperor of Constantinople, who have just received the first weapons of mass destruction in history - "dark fire", and China itself, planning the Great March to the West (" small victorious war" to solve the internal problems of the Celestial Empire)…