Accessory - Dragon Magazine #111.pdf - Index of

careless enough to commit accidental suicide . . . “I’m
waiting, young man.”
“Waiting for what? You have your price. In my land,
few men hear a warrior’s blade-name and live.” He made
a sound like a cranky bear. “There! Must you have it
again, woman? Three times three, to work a spell that will
enslave me to you forever ?” He repeated the ursine sound
nine times and got a minor nosebleed.
“You mean . . . that grunting noise. . . ?”
The man looked proud. “Only the third to have earned
that name among my tribefolk in twenty generations!
There, I have fulfilled your demand, now you must fulfill
mine!”
Charlene felt that she had been here before, with the
difference that this fellow had not yet bought her dinner,
although he was a sight better-looking than her last blind
date. Still, he was clearly only after one thing, and she
was a lady.
“The runes! The runes of return! What, was my name
not enough to purchase them?”
Charlene took a long cleansing breath of the sort her
therapist recommended. Then, having mastered her emotions,
she said, “My dear Mr. —” She grunted.
He wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Easterners’ accent!
Faugh! Even in this distant plane it haunts me.”
“I am doing the best I can, Mr. —” Another attempt.
Another grimace. “Eastern ears . . . only good for
hanging rings from,” the mispronounced warrior grumbled.
“Or collecting to dry.” In a louder voice he added,
“They call me Bonemaker in the legends.”
“Mr. Bonemaker, I think we could both use a drink.”
“Ha! Now you make sense.” He turned to kick away
the empty wineskin. “Strong drink to charge your spells
with might and fill my sword-arm with power. And then
. . . death to Cambrac!”
“Lower your voice this instant!” Charlene hissed. With
a self-assured toss of her head she added, “This is a
library.”
Sometime later in the basement snack bar, wrapped in a
janitor’s coverall that Charlene had managed to snag for
him, Bonemaker became simultaneously aquainted with
decaffeinated coffee and despair.
“You mean . . . you’re not a sorceress?”
“I am a librarian. I take care of books. You do have
books where you come from, Mr. Bonemaker?”
In mute pain he nodded, then said, “And this . . . is
not a powerful wizard’s stronghold? A warrior-king’s castle?
The lair of fabulous monsters that can leap from one
world to the next if a man has the wit and sinew to tame
them?”
Remembering how she had found him in tears,
Charlene reached across the table and patted his hand
gently. “Only under ‘F,’ Mr. Bonemaker; for ‘Fiction.’ ”
“Under where?”
“In the card catalog.” She saw that he was giving her a
look similar to one she’d given him on learning that his
name was best pronounced by a dyspeptic grizzly. “Where
we keep track of the books: which ones we have, where
they are, when they were published, title, subject,
author . . . Whatever you want to know can be found in
the catalog.”
Bonemaker crushed his cardboard cup, sending Sanka
squirting. Charlene was still wondering whether it would
leave permanent stains on twill as he frog-marched her up
the stairs to the first floor where the vast card catalogs of
Yale awaited.
“Find them,” he growled in her ear. She could feel the
insistent prick of a dagger blade in the small of her back.
For a man who had showed up in her dimension with so
little to wear, Bonemaker had managed to conceal an
extraordinary amount of armaments on his person. “Find
the runes of return.”
“Now listen, you are clearly out of your mind,” she
whispered back. “I am a librarian, not a miracle worker!”
“You said that whatever I wanted to know is here. Find
them!”
The dagger jabbed a little deeper, making her yip. One
of the many students huddled at the high tables near the
catalogs looked up. “Shhhhh!” he said.
“Find the runes of return,” Bonemaker pressed. “Seek
them where you seek the monsters, in the place called
Undereff.”
“You just won’t understand, will you? ‘F’ is for Fiction.
Runes of return would be under ‘R’ for — well, for
‘Runes.’ Or possibly ‘Return.’ But I assure you, you
aren’t going to find any such things in Sterling Memorial
Librar— ee! ”
Bonemaker lodged a rather pointed argument.
With a sigh and a shrug, Charlene said, “Fine, fine,
don’t take a trained librarian’s word for anything. I suppose
you’ve got tenure too, wherever you come from. We
shall look under ‘R,’ but I’m warning you . . .”
She was a woman transformed by revelation (also under
‘R’) when she lifted her head from the rack of cards and
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