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Venice, rich in history, sickness and debauchery, is the splendid background to The Cabalist. Closeted in a damp, sunless room in a poorer quarter of the city, Joseph Kestler, old and terminally ill, is struggling to record the secrets of a strange trade and safeguard his life's work for future generations. But it is not easy. He has strong adversaries – his own mortality, an unsympathetic century, and the Catcher, an irritating and malevolent child demon, who delights in taunting the dying man. Kestler's discoveries are most precious; they are the hidden truth of the ancient power of numbers – the cabala. With this awesome craft, Kestler is transformed – no longer a frail, lonely man who aches for companionship, but a wizard, a magus, someone who can touch the opposite mysteries of virtue and evil, the quick and the dead, the past and what is still to come.