It is the early 1790s in a Poland on the verge of being partitioned into extinction by its greedy neighbors, with the Russian Empire in the lead. The Jewish false messiah Jacob Frank has recently died. Frank had led his followers in escaping persecution from the rabbinical leadership of the Jewish community by pretending to embrace Catholicism, all the while secretly adhering to his occult doctrines of redemption, black magic, and the overcoming of death, poverty, and the ravages of ageing bodies. Once the Church realized his treachery, it imprisoned Frank for more than a decade in the fortress at Czestochowa, home also to the famous painting of the Black Madonna. While a prisoner of the Church, Frank had new and greater revelations of secret powers, which he believed could vanquish decay and disease. But he was unable to wield these esoteric truths to save his flock before his own death.

With the master gone to his grave, his disciples are adrift and lost. One disciple, however, is determined to succeed where the master failed. Allying with a vain and dangerously violent Polish nobleman, this disciple will take Frank's teachings to their ultimate limit-and reap the consequences.