“Then what do you want us to do?” Sophia wanted to know what her options were before making a decision. That was even more important now. “And how can we get Amy the last Challenge she needs?”

  Los’en turned towards Amy. “Which one do you need?”

  “Huntsman’s Target from the Wyld Hunt Challenge. I’m not looking forward to it, everything I’ve heard about it says it’s the worst Challenge to get past on the list. Master Ermine had it set for six days from now, and I think she had the escort picked out, but, ah…” Amy opened her hands in something close to a shrug.

  “An escort isn’t a problem, you know that. I’ll escort you,” Los’en offered. “I’ll have to make sure the Challenge is guarded by people we can trust, but I can manage that for the few hours it’ll take, as long as they don’t know to look for us there. I’m not sure I can get you in if they do know to look.”

  “Then it all comes down to Aric,” Sophia stated uncertainly. “And I have no idea what he’s going to say.”

  “Nothing, so far,” Los’en answered surprisingly. “Nothing that can hurt you, at least. He claims you’re a cute girl he ran into outside the Temple, so you came in together, and that he’s amazed you were chosen for a Hallow. He’s being held in the Broken Temple as a “guest,” probably because they don’t want him talking about someone being Hallowed, since they haven’t admitted that anyone was Hallowed today or that the sword is gone. They haven’t told him that you’re Hallowed by someone other than the Broken Lord, either.”

  “You have someone on the inside, don’t you?” Dav’s question interrupted Sophia’s thoughts about what Aric might or might not have realized and how long he’d keep his mouth shut.

  “How else would I know what the Hilt is planning?” Los’en shrugged as his smile broadened into a full grin. “I want the Broken Temple gone, not in control of Izel. That means I need to know their plans. Unfortunately, while I can listen, I can’t influence them; the Hilt only listens to a few people even among their Hallowed. It’s easy enough to find out what Aric has said, harder to find out what the Hilt is planning. I didn’t know he was going to attack the Registry until people were already on the way. Fortunately, that was soon enough to alert Master Ermine; they got a cooler reception than they expected.”

  “Not cool enough,” Marcie snapped. The mouse-eared librarian was clearly out of patience with Los’en. “Or I wouldn’t have had to run and you’d have been able to go get your own niece! The Registry Master may have beaten back the attackers, but the Registry is closed and the Registry never closes! Get to the point already and stop dancing around it. You want to ask them to do something, ask already!”

  Sophia stared at Marcie. She didn’t think she’d ever seen the librarian lose her temper before; she hadn’t even really realized she had a temper.

  Amy put an arm around Marcie’s shoulders. The mousekin started to shake it off, then sighed instead, but her glare never left Los’en.

  “I was getting to it,” Los’en objected quietly. His smile was gone; Sophia wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  “Very slowly,” Marcie said with emphasis on each syllable. “Try faster.”

  “I was!” Los’en objected again. He turned back towards Sophia again. “So, uh, I said you weren’t the only one who got a message from their Patron, right?”

  Sophia nodded. They’d gone over that already; so had Dav. Amy hadn’t and Sophia wasn’t certain about Taika.

  “Well, the Transcendent gave me a Task.” The capital letters were clear in Los’en’s words. “It’s the only reason I knew you got the sword, because even the people I have inside the Temple either don’t know that or aren’t willing to say. It’s simple on the surface, but it won’t be simple to do. He wants us to steal the power of the Broken Sword and take it for our own.”

  Los’en seemed uncertain for a moment, then cleared his throat and continued. “It’s a second-upgrade Task. That’s not at all appropriate for your team, but I can’t exactly leave you out of it because it’s too dangerous, not when you obtained the Broken Sword in the first place. I can’t be sure if you’d get part of the reward for the Task for giving me the sword or not.”

  Sophia didn’t think she’d heard of the Transcendent before, but she was pretty sure she’d only heard of five Patrons: the Wanderer, the Broken Lord, M’Beja the Mage, Aeric Openhand the Beastmaster, and the Bard. There were clearly more. Los’en clearly trusted the Transcendent. Sophia wasn’t sure if she should or not; while she was pretty sure the Wanderer didn’t have bad intentions towards her or Dav, she didn’t know anything about the other Patrons.

  What she did know was that, according to the Wanderer, the Broken Lord’s people killed all of the other Hallowed in the Broken Lands in the past. That was a long time ago, but it sounded like it hadn’t changed. That meant it was probably safe to guess that the Transcendent was also the Broken Lord’s enemy. It might not make him an ally, but at least it meant they had something in common.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  A Task, on the other hand, was easy to figure out. It was the same thing as a Quest, back home. Sophia wondered if the Guide was as frugal as the Voice; back home, Quest rewards were either provided by the person who created the Quest or they were inherent in the situation. It was very rare for the Voice to provide any rewards beyond that.

  That seemed to be different here; the Guide was willing to give rewards for Feats. Tasks might be the same, or the rewards might be provided by the Transcendent. Either way, it was clear that Los’en thought they’d be good.

  “That’s part of why I want to understand how you’re keeping them from finding it,” Los’en admitted. “I think that’s a lot of the danger in the Task; if the Hilt finds out where it is, he’s certain to come himself and bring some of his Templars. I might be able to handle him on my own, and my sister definitely can, as can Ermine, but if he brings his people … we’re outnumbered and many of them are Hallowed. I don’t know if we’d win or not, and that’s before adding in whatever power the Broken Lord put in the Broken Sword. Even if we do win, it may not be a good win; we’re certain to lose people and so will the Templars. That makes Izel far weaker, and I’m expecting monsters some time soon; there’s usually one last group early in the snow season, and we haven’t seen that yet.”

  Sophia nodded. “We can’t do anything with it if it stays where it is. I might have a way to hide it when we take it out, though. I haven’t had a chance to look for it yet.”

  “If you can,” Los’en started, then shook his head. “If you can, you’ll deserve every one of the Wisps you’ll get for completing a second-upgrade Task while not yet past the first upgrade, as well as anything else it gives. If they don’t know where to go, the only risk is the Broken Sword itself. I don’t know how dangerous it is; this could be easy as long as the Hilt is ignorant or it could be incredibly dangerous. The Transcendent didn’t say, if he even knows.”

  Sophia frowned at that, but Dav beat her to the question. “What did he say?”

  “To rededicate the power of the Broken Sword to myself and the Transcendent, I need to touch it. While that is happening, I will be unable to use my Spheres. Other Hallowed can help the same way; it will go to them and their Patron. That’s all he said about how to do it.” Los’en shook his head. “It’s not much, but it’s all I have. His explanation of why it’s necessary makes more sense; without the Broken Sword, the Broken Lord will be more limited in who he can Hallow and he won’t be able to feed his people power taken from elsewhere. He didn’t say what that meant, but he did say that it was the reason he was going to use some of the sword’s power to destroy it after we finished stealing it.”

  Sophia barely listened to the reasons for doing it; it was enough to know that it would make things more difficult for someone who probably wanted to kill her. The fact that touching the Broken Sword was enough was far more interesting. “When I touched a piece in the Temple, there was colorful but quiet lightning. I bet that’s what the Task means. It also stole a lot of my mana. We’ll need to be careful about that.”

  Sophia stiffened as another piece of information clicked. “I bet that’s why the Wanderer said I had to take the piece I touched! He said it was because they could use it to find me, and that must mean it’s linked to whoever uses it, and the lightning changed that. I bet we could use the other pieces to find the Hilt, if we wanted to.”

  “We don’t need to,” Los’en objected.

  Dav snorted. “You sure about that? It sounds like it’d help a lot to know if the Hilt was coming after you or looking somewhere else.”

  “It doesn’t matter if we can or not,” Sophia interrupted. There was no reason to head down that rabbit hole, even if she was the one who brought it up. “I doubt we’ll be able to track him with it once the pieces are destroyed, so the most we can do is see if there’s a way to add a … I don’t know, a Templar-detector into the runescript that shields the pieces while we do what we’re doing, and I’m not sure I can do that.”

  Realistically, her ability to modify a runescript to add a feature like that were essentially nil unless there was an example in her notebook that was really close. She knew her father could do it, but he was an expert; she wasn’t. She was barely a novice. The fact that she really hadn’t practiced at all since she came to the Broken Lands didn’t help; she was rusty.

  “It’s going to take me days to dig through what I’ve got and see if I can set up something that will work as an isolation area without the bag,” Sophia added. “I think we might as well try, since we need to wait days for the Wyld Hunt Challenge. Dav, Amy? Taika?”

  Sophia scolded herself for almost forgetting Taika again. There was no reason to ask Cliff, but she really did need to remember that Taika wasn’t just the ball of fluff that he looked like.

  Taika was the first to speak up, proving that he had actually been listening. “I’m certainly not going to turn down a chance to easily pick up some Wisps.”

  “I want to study the stuff on the Wyld Hunt,” Amy added. “I figured we’d do that after the Reflection Challenge. I can do that while you do whatever you need to, then we can get together to deal with the sword afterwards?”

  “We have a few things to pick up, too. I can get most of it, but I think you’ll need to come when we head to pick up your armor,” Dav added. “Once we have that all done…” He trailed off with a frown, then turned towards Los’en. “Is the sword itself dangerous, or is it just that it lets people know where we are? What else are we accepting by … what did you call it, taking its power for ourselves? What does that even mean?”

  “I already told you everything I know,” Los’en admitted. “It’s a Task, which means it’s something the Transcendent wants me to do. He doesn’t give them often, so this must be important. Beyond that?” Amy’s uncle shrugged. “I’m happy to take a tool away from the Hilt, so if there’s a cost I don’t know about, I’ll have to deal with it when it happens. It should be worthwhile; the Transcendent wouldn’t ask if he thought it wasn’t.”

  Dav gave Los’en a long, considering look before he finally nodded. “I’m in, then. Here’s hoping all the surprises are good.”

  I wonder how the Transcendent knew the Broken Lord’s Broken Sword was stolen so quickly. It’s not like one of his Hallowed stole it, which is obviously how the Wanderer knew…