“Where is Ephyra?” Beru asked. “Just tell me they aren’t hurting her.”

“I could tell you that, if you’d like,” Lazaros said in his quiet, whispery voice. “But it could easily be a lie, so what would be the point?”

“I don’t think you’d lie to me,” Beru said. He looked, for a brief moment, surprised. She pressed the advantage. “Don’t you have any family? Someone you’d do anything to protect?”

His gray eyes were intent and unsettling on her face. “I had parents.”

“Had?” she repeated. “Did they die?”

It was another long moment, their footsteps echoing quietly through the tunnel, before he replied. “The man who sired me and the woman who birthed me are still alive. But their son is long dead.”

Beru shivered.

“We—” He cut himself off, his eyes flicking away from her for the first time.

“What?” she asked sharply.

“We’re the same,” he said quietly. “I know what it is to be destroyed and made into something new. Something pure.”

She stared, swallowing down her revulsion. “That’s what you think I am? Pure?”

He met her gaze again, his gray eyes shining. “You are the vessel of the Creator. That makes you holy.”

He was so certain. She almost envied him that belief.

IF HE WANTS TO WORSHIP ME, HE CAN START BY FREEING ME, the god said.

Beru ignored it.

“And the Hierophant?” she asked. “Pallas? Is he holy, too?”

“Of course,” Lazaros said swiftly. “The Immaculate One—”

“He lied to you. He’s a Prophet,” Beru hissed, and she knew it was her own voice, her own words, but it felt like the god was speaking through her. “He killed it—me—in the first place. Is that holy?”

Lazaros hesitated. She could see on his face that it wasn’t the first time he’d been confronted with this idea. But it was perhaps the first time he’d heard it spoken aloud.

“A necessary sin,” Lazaros said at last. “There must be darkness for there to be light.”

She stared at him a moment longer, wondering at how easily he could arrange his own beliefs to justify his master. Wondering what was inside him that made these ideas grow like a weed, taking over everything. A belief that was almost cannibalistic, eating itself until there was nothing left, no truth, no sense, just the Hierophant.

She would never understand it.

The tunnel spat them out at the top of an amphitheater bracketed by the edge of a cliff. The sea roiled below, filling Beru’s ears with the roar of the waves crashing against the rocks. The stands of the amphitheater were crowded with people—from their intricate robes, Beru guessed they were the Priests’ Conclave, as well as a group of Sentry in light blue uniforms, and a smaller cluster of swordsmen in darker blue cloaks.