Gargoyle's Gift

Artek stood atop a stone pillar.

He was in a vast, dimly lit hall. A line of freestanding columns stretched in either direction, each perhaps ten paces apart. Like the one Artek stood upon, all ended abruptly, supporting nothing but thin air. If there was a ceiling to this place, it was lost in the gloom above. With his orcish eyes, he could just make out the floor of the hall below. It was writhing. Even without his darkvision he could have guessed the nature of the slithering shadows by the dry hissing that rose on the air-snakes. There were hundreds of them, thousands. And more than a few of them were probably venomous.

Glancing down at the dark tattoo on his forearm, he saw that the sun was nearly touching the arrow now. Dawn was just minutes away. And his death with it.

Artek flinched at a sudden, reverberating boom! There was a long moment of silence, followed by a second crash. Then came another, and another. His jaw fell in grim surprise. It looked as if something else were going to kill him first.

The pillars were falling. Even as he watched, one of the columns farther down the line tilted in his direction and struck the column next to it with a thunderous cracking of stone, causing this column to begin to fall as well. It was a chain reaction-one by one, they were all going to topple.

The tenth column from him began to fall. Then the ninth. He turned, took as much of a running start as the constraining surface allowed, then leapt to the top of the next pillar. Letting his momentum carry him forward, he tensed his legs and sprang to the pinnacle of the next pillar in line. Behind him, the columns continued to topple. The seventh farthest from him fell. Then the sixth. He kept jumping.

His lungs burned with effort. The fourth column behind him crashed to the floor, and then the third. He could not jump fast enough-the columns were gaining on him. A few seconds more and he would crash to the snake-strewn floor below with a thousand tons of stone. Then he saw it hovering in midair just ahead: a glowing square filled with billowing gray mist He blinked in confusion. How could this be?

There was a deafening crash and the stone beneath his feet gave a violent shudder. He fell sprawling to the top of the pillar and nearly went flying over the side. He gripped the edge, hauling himself back up. As he did, the column tilted wildly, then began to trace a smooth, fatal arc toward the floor below. The pillar was falling.

With a desperate cry, Artek sprang up and forward with all of his strength. For a terrified moment, he thought he wasn't going to make it, but then his body broke the surface of the gate, and he fell down into gray emptiness.

As before, his body seemed to dissolve away. He had no substance, no flesh-only a naked, quivering consciousness to be flayed raw by the bitter cold. Thankfully, the horrible sensation lasted only a second. There was a flash. The reek of lightning filled his nostrils, and he fell hard to a stone floor. Groaning, he pulled himself to his feet,

A trio of trolls stood before him.

They reached out with long arms, baring countless filthy, pointy teeth. With a cry of alarm, Artek fumbled for the cursed saber at his hip and drew it with a ring of steel. He did not wait for the trolls to attack first. He swung the saber, striking the arm of one of the creatures. The limb snapped with a brittle sound and fell to the floor. The troll did not so much as blink. Its companions were equally still. Artek stared in puzzlement.

Cautiously, he approached the creatures, tapping one with his saber. It tottered, then fell backward. As it struck the floor, it shattered.

Clay, Artek realized in amazement. The trolls were made of clay. The cursed saber did not compel him to attack the harmless figures. As he stared down at the broken monster, he noticed that the floor looked odd. He scratched the stones with the point of the saber, and a thick line of gray curled up, revealing brown wood below. It was paint. What was going on here?

Before Artek could think of an answer, there was a sizzling sound as a gate appeared in the air above. A form dropped through, landing on the floor with a soft oof! It was Beckla. He quickly helped the wizard to her feet as the gate flashed into nonexistence. The wizard's brown eyes were wide and staring, almost mad. At last she shuddered and looked at Artek.

"Where are the others?" she gasped.

Even as she said this, three more gates crackled into existence. Each spat out a single figure before vanishing. Corin and Guss groggily picked themselves up, while Muragh rolled in a dizzy circle.

The young nobleman blinked in bewilderment. "I don't understand. I was plummeting to my death. Then a gray square appeared below me and I fell into it and… and here I am."

"I was about to be melted into slag when the same thing happened to me," Guss said with a shudder. Wisps of smoke still wafted from his scaly hide.

"And I was on the verge of being dissolved into skull soup,” Muragh said in a quavering voice.

"What is going on?" Artek wondered. "Where are we?"

"We're in Undermountain," Beckla said in awe.

"I can see that," Artek replied dryly.

"No, not the real Undermountain," Beckla countered. Her forehead crinkled in a frown. "Though I suppose we are there, too."

"Make up your mind," Artek said.

"Don't you see?" Beckla circled the chamber, studying the clay trolls, the painted walls, the wooden floor. "We're inside the miniature." She waited for the others to absorb this fact and then went on.

"It was the Horned Ring," the wizard explained. "I thought that if each of us still had a ruby from the ring, there was a chance it might be able to gate us all to the same place. So I concentrated on Halaster's cavern as I invoked the ring. And it worked. It brought us all here." She ran a hand through her short hair, gazing around. "Only something went wrong. The magic that binds Halaster's model of Undermountain must permeate the entire cavern. I think there must have been some strange interaction between the Horned Ring and that magic."

In shock, Artek stared at the clay trolls. He had thought them to be statues, but now he knew that wasn't so. They were figurines-the kind with which Halaster populated his model of Undermountain. This entire room was no more than a few inches long.

"By all the bloodiest gods!" he shouted, whirling to look at Beckla. "Do you mean to tell me that each of us is now the size of one of Halaster's figurines?"

The wizard nodded grimly. "In a word, yes. And I imagine that, somewhere in Undermountain, there are now five life-sized clay replicas of us, falling off cliffs and getting dissolved by acid. Somehow the interference between the model and the ring has caused us to switch places with our figurines."

Artek staggered, leaning against a painted paper column for support-this was too much. "At least it won't be much work to bury me," he said in a slightly manic voice. "No need to dig six feet. Six inches will do fine."

"Wait a minute," Corin said. The nobleman paced quickly back and forth, his face lined in thought. This might not be as bad as it seems."

"Apparently, you have a better imagination than I do," Beckla noted dubiously.

"Actually, my idea is really rather simple," Corin went on. "Halaster seems to have taken great care in making this miniature an exact working replica of Undermountain. Don't you see?" He paused meaningfully. "It's perfect in every way."

"Spit it out, Corin!" Muragh griped. "What are you getting at?"

Artek looked at the young man in astonishment. "I see what Corin means," he said. "Wish Gate!"

"Indubitably!" Corin cried.

"Of course!" Beckla exclaimed. "Halaster has taken almost pathological care in recreating every detail in this model-there's no reason to believe that the miniature Wish Gate won't act just like the real one."