Old Mrs. Ellison doesn't have much longer to live, and her scheming son Cedric is counting the days until he inherits her fortune. But his plans are upset by the arrival of his niece Varvara, a beautiful and wild young woman from a remote Chinese region known as the 'Sea of Glass', a strange land where wars are fought with crossbows and 'highly damaging curses' and where death may come at any moment in the form of a venomous barking spider. With the aid of a love-struck law student and a bibulous butler, Varvara aims to thwart the wiles of her evil uncle-but events take an unexpected and...