The book resumes the discussion where it left off in the previous one: Lou Ignis thwarted a coup attempt that jeopardized his crown and, under the command of his rajaputi, is stationed in the jungle a few meters from the pagoda. But while he is about to break into you, convinced that the conspirators are inside, he realizes that he has been lured into a trap by his rajaputi, corrupted at great cost by the conspirators, and the coup d'état is only at the beginning.
Left without warriors and with only two of his twenty elephants, he has no choice but to instruct his faithful Kammamuri and Timul to take the first train to Calcutta, instructing them to warn Sandaukan via telegram of the grave danger looming over the Empire. Despite a terrible sea disaster plotted against the two travellers in the heart of the jungle, Kammamuri and Timul arrive safely in Madura, managing to contact the piracy leader. In the city, they also get fresh news that definitively clears the doubts to the reader: behind the self-styled brahmin conspirator who rocked the political life of Madura in the previous book, there is Azarab, who made a cameo groping Wabi at the end of Conquering an Empire. Kammamuri and Timul, having completed the mission, take the first ship to Oecussi, a border town from which they plan to return to Java by sea, but are detained by the Hapsburg police, engaged in an investigation into the death of a passenger of the train them. Escaped from their arrests with a daring escape, the two return to Java, but immediately realize that, in their absence, the situation has worsened: Wabi's disgusting boss Azarab, in command of over twenty thousand people, has reached the gates of the Maduran capital, leaving behind rivers of blood and almost everybody dead. At this point, Pau devises a last, desperate plan: He just makes sure that Azarab must be killed by Sandaukan in the mud.
Anyway, Azarab burns the capital, now reduced to a ghost town, and waits to be squeezed to death by the troops of Sandaukan, barricaded in the city sewer.
