“We need rules. A procedure for the succession.”

“No.” Regina grasped Venus’s arm with bony fingers. “No rules, save the rule of three. Let them come forward, and make their own rules, their own contest.”

“There will be conflict. Every woman wants daughters.”

“Then let them fight. The strongest will prevail. The Order will be stronger for it . . .”

The blood must be preserved, kept pure, for the blood was the past, and the past was better than the future. Sisters matter more than daughters. Let them remember that; let them obey it, and the rest would follow.

And: “Ignorance is strength.”

This time Leda was with her. “I don’t understand, dear.”

“We cannot survive. We old ones cannot run the Order forever. But the Order must be immortal. This is not a little empire and it never must be so. There must be no leader to fall, no traitor to betray us. The seniors must step back into the shadows, the Council must abdicate whatever powers it can. The Order itself must sustain its own existence. Let no one question. Let no one know more than she needs to perform her tasks. That way, if one fails, another can replace her, and the Order will go on. The Order, emerging from us all, will prevail. Ignorance is strength.”

Leda still didn’t understand. But in the corridors of her failing mind, Regina saw it clearly.

To survive into the future you needed a system: that was the one indisputable lesson she had learned since arriving in Rome. The Romans had had a genius for organizations that functioned effectively for generations, despite political instability and corruption and all the other failings of humanity. Though the army was shamelessly used by pretenders to the throne and other adventurers for their own ends, it had always remained a military force of unparalleled effectiveness; and even though senators and others would misuse the legal system for their own ends, throughout the Empire, normal and competent processes of justice had served enormous numbers of people in every aspect of their daily lives. Even the city itself had sustained its own identity, its own organization, across a thousand years of unplanned growth, forty or fifty generations of people, for the city, too, was a system.

Systems, yes. And it was a system that she had been trying to establish here, following her instincts, bit by bit, as the years wore away. A system that would endure. A system that would work, even when the people it sustained had forgotten it existed.