Read Online Quest for the Sun by V M Jones - Free Book Online Page A

half-smile, there was nothing left to tell; no one left to trust. Only the motionless huddle of the others, exhausted by a day that seemed to have gone on forever — and would almost certainly be our last.
    I was in no hurry for it to end.

    My eyes jerked open. The kaleidoscope of stars had shifted. Time had passed; I must have slept. Had I dreamed it? No — the sleeping hum of the computer had deepened into a new note: a swelling buzz. It wasn’t the computer. It was the elevator.
    The hum snapped abruptly into silence. I sat still as stone, the bars digging into my back, staring past the candle — lower now, guttering in a puddle of wax — at the closed door of the lift. It slid open.
    The dark bulk of the toad hunched and hissed. There was an answering growl. The creature sank back into the shadows where wall met floor, the two dim, hooded lamps of its eyes following the moving shape across the room. The door sighed shut.
    Kai’s face peered through the bars. ‘Adam,’ he breathed, ‘be you awake?’ At the sound of his voice my throat tightened.There was something in his face … an odd kind of shyness.
    â€˜Yes,’ I whispered back. ‘I’m awake.’
    â€˜Give me your hand.’
    Puzzled, still half in a dream, I reached my right hand through the bars, expecting him to give me something, or grasp my wrist in the traditional handshake of Karazan. He didn’t. He kissed it.
    My face flamed in the darkness. I drew a breath to make some light-hearted quip that would brush his gesture aside and turn it into a joke — into something I’d feel comfortable with. The words were halfway to my lips when I saw his face. The rounded cheeks of the boy we’d known had hardened into the strong, flat planes of a man — and they were streaked with tears.
    I thought about what those tears meant and something deep in my heart clicked into place. To me … well, I was just me, Adam Equinox. I’d blundered through life inside my own skin, messing up and picking up the pieces and somehow soldiering on. But that wasn’t who I was to Kai. It wasn’t who I’d have the luxury of ever being again … even to myself.
    Kai had lived for this moment, risked everything for it, for Karazan … for me. I took a long, slow breath and tightened my fingers round his hand. ‘Kai, look at me.’ We locked eyes. I lifted his hand, turned it, and touched the back to my cheek for a second; tried to smile, but my eyes had filled with tears.
    In a hurried whisper I told him everything: about Highgate, Q, the diary, me. ‘Kai,’ I finished, ‘we need your help. If we all try together can we lift the cage? Or open it? Is there some way we can get the key?’
    He shook his head wordlessly. We’d all watched the tiny silver key Evor had used to open the cage disappear into the folds of his purple cloak.
    â€˜Then there’s only one thing for it. We’ll have to wait until they let us out in the morning. With luck I’ll be first. I’ll need a weapon …’
    Again, Kai shook his head. There was something almostapologetic about the way he was looking at me. ‘My lord, there be two secrets I have discovered in the service of Karazeel. They are of great import, and I must reveal them to you now, though I cannot see how they will aid you. The first is this. We know there be a magic portal in the Cliffs of Stone: a door that opens but once in four spans, at Sunbalance.’ I nodded. We’d spoken of it moments before: it was the portal Zagros told of in Queen Zaronel’s diary, the one I’d been smuggled through as a baby, and our escape route last time we’d been in Karazan.
    â€˜At first it was a secret known to none but Meirion the Prophet Mage. But Meirion vanished; the years passed, and the legend of the Lost Prince refused to die. It was whispered that the infant had been taken into another world: