1840 In houses. Benckendorf - the head of the secret police - is Count Kiselev. Experienced courtiers begin a kind of “chess game”, involving each other in a cunning political intrigue. Six months later, a young fencing master, Ivan Karlovich Falk, arrives in the district town of Kurgan at the invitation of a local landowner. The young man does not yet know that he was hired to teach fencing to serfs. The hero will have to find out what is happening in the notorious estate and understand the vicissitudes of high politics. How many deaths will happen before the game of the secret services of the great empire ends?