We are approaching 1666, 'The Year of the Beast', the year in which mystics and sages predict the world will end. Balthasar Embriaco provisions a mule train and leaves his Levantine curio shop, carried on the tide of irrational fear which is sweeping his community. He is in pursuit of a rare book, The Hundredth Name. Legends multiply around this scholarly tome; some say it does not even exist, but if it does, it contains the hundredth name of God. The Koran gives 99; the faithful (of all religions) find that teasing. This hundredth name, surely, is the most powerful of all. It will confer divine protection and divine favour, so that those who can invoke it will be saved, just as Noah in his time was preserved from the flood.

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