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gifted individuals were summoners. Mutes born with two gifts - such as

Mr Snow (wordsmith and summoner) and Cadillac (wordsmith and' seer)

were extremely rare. And summoners as powerful as Mr Snow and

Clearwater were rarer still.

The same degrees of professional competence applied to wordsmiths, The

M'Calls had enjoyed the benefit of an unbroken line of wordsmiths

stretching back through successive generations to the War of a Thousand

Suns.

This distinction, shared by only a handful of clans, enhanced Mr Snow's

standing but also engendered a great deal of envy.

In many respects, wordsmiths resembled any group of Pre-H

professionals. Like lawyers, they came in all shapes and sizes and

while they all possessed what was once known as 'the gift of the gab'

their performance as 20th century clients often discovered to their

cost spanned the ratings from the peaks of excellence to the troughs of

incompetence.

Like the plethora of personal computers of the pre-H era that came

fitted with differing amounts of hard-disc storage, some wordsmiths'

memories were better than others. Compared to the ordinary Mute armed

with the equivalent of 256K RAM, your average wordsmith with a hundred

gigabytes on line was a mental giant - a walking reference library.

However, as with all people-based systems, there was one drawback.

Memory is not a product or function of character: the most able brains

do not necessarily reside inside the heads of charismatic human beings,

or even just plain nice ones. The greatest data-bank in the world is

not worth a row of beans if there's a dildo manning the front desk.

But when a few zillion gigabytes of memory was allied to an exceedingly

acute mind - as in the case of Mr Snow - the result was an outstanding

personality whose opinions and influence extended far beyond the narrow

confines of their own clan or even their own bloodline.

But while Mr Snow might be regarded as the star of the She-Kargo, there

were other noteworthy contenders among the D'Troit and C'Natti ready to

pit their wits against his. And they were present on that fateful

morning.

Last year, Mr Snow, by virtue of his age and experience, had been

selected to chair the proceedings; this year, his place had been

awarded to a senior wordsmith from the rival faction - Prime-Cut,

leader of the Clan R'Nato from the bloodline of the D'Troit.

Because of Cadillac's triumphal progress through Illinois, Iowa and

eastern Nebraska - where the trail had run cold - the hottest topic

among the wordsmiths from those areas was the appearance of The Chosen,

the trio from the Clan m'call. The news of their exploits and their

escape from the Eastern Lands was not confined to the bull-ring.

Exaggerated reports of their prowess passed on by those who had

witnessed their travelling road-show were now spreading like a

bush-fire through the whole encampment.

To the wordsmiths from the various delegations it was both a source of

satisfaction and alarm. Apart from Carnegie-Hall and Mr Snow, none of

those present were aware of any prophecy which bore a reference to

these individuals and no seer had found their image in the stones. The

prediction which came closest referred to the return of The Lost Ones

the generations of Mutes who had been taken away by the dead-faces to

the Fire-Pits of Beth-Lem and their off-spring, the Iron-Feet - born

into slavery in the Eastern lands.

Invited to take centre-stage, Carnegie-Hall launched into a colourful

explanation of how he had met Cadillac, Clearwater and Cloud-Warhor

carefully omitting the details of his treacherous deal with Izo

Wantanabe.

Guided by Talisman he had despatched a posse of Kojak warriors through

the winter snows to a rendezvous with the select band of individuals

who were to herald the coming of the Thrice-Gifted One.

A graphic account of their powers - which Clearwater had used to

destroy four arrowheads with one wave of her hand and which, later, had

been employed to rip the belly out of an iron-snake- made a deep

impression on his attentive audience. When he had finished, he

appealed to Mr Snow. Had the Sky Voices not told him that Cadillac,