Accessory - Dragon Magazine #111.pdf - Index of

he met him, as she had always
dreamed she would meet her Mr.
Right, in the university library where
she worked. Dismissed for improper
use of backbone by her supervisor,
Mr. Ballard, from her post beneath
Our Lady of the Circulation Desk — a mural of churchly
appearance, provenance unknown — she was doing penitential
stack-work when their paths first crossed.
Like many a Yale student too lazy to make a selection
from the shelf and go seeking an unoccupied carrel in
which to read it, he sat on the floor at a dead-end narrow
aisle between two rows of stacks. Legs drawn up into a
flat-footed squat, at first glance his posture and occupation
were old hat to any experienced librarian.
The old hat was squashed past recognition at second
glance.
Naked, muscled like statues that made her nervous,
skin aglow with healthy sweat and surrounding atmosphere
pungent with the same, he was reading a back
issue of National Geographic and blubbering. A deflated
wineskin lay beside him, a little liquid still dripping and
dribbling from the narrow neck to make a tiny puddle on
the floor.
And of course there was the matter of the sword, a hefty
double-edged blade whose long hilt demanded two hands
to wield it. The miniature golden skull on the pommel
gave her a saucy wink of diamond eyes.
Charlene shook in her Cobbie Cuddlers to think what
Mr. Ballard was going to say about all this. In an undertone
she thanked her stars that she wasn’t the one on
stack-access duty today. If this person had a Yale student
I.D., she was a rutabaga.
(Less kindly things had been said of Charlene Atwater,
but all from the lips of unsatisfactory blind dates who were
only after one thing.)
Softly, with the discretion of a lifetime of sensible,
rubber-soled shoes, Charlene began backing the cart out
of the aisle. Prudence guided her to duck her ash-blond
head out of sight behind a quarto volume of Western
European costume plates as she made her retreat.
A wise move, as it turned out. Though she was departing
even more silently than she had arrived, circumstance
was capricious. She heard a snort, a gutteral cry of astonishment,
the scuffle of bare feet on the stone floor, and a
skin-tingling yell. Something went whooosh through the
air, thunk, and the book cart slammed into the top of
Charlene’s bowed head with enough force to rattle her
teeth and knock her off her Cobbies.
“Who are you?” The voice was a roar in her ears that
made painful afterimages of blue and orange light bursts
across her eyes. “Speak!”
Slowly, Charlene sat up, rubbing her crown. For some
reason this made the whole back of her skull throb. The
stack-cart was gone, but she knew it had been there only a
moment ago. It had bowled her over splay-legged, in such
a suggestive manner that Mr. Ballard would have had the
giggles for a week. But where was it now. . . ? She looked
left, right, and over one shoulder before she was rewarded
with success.
A pile of flinders and gracefully revolving casters
File Under
"B"
By Esther M. Friesner
Illustrations by Valerie Valusek
DRAGON 73