The Order would be like a mosaic, she thought—but not of the kind her father used to make. Imagine a mosaic assembled not by a single master designer but by a hundred workers. Let each of them place her tesserae in harmony with those of her sisters. Then from these small acts of sympathy, from sisters simply listening to each other, a greater and enduring harmony would emerge. And it was a harmony that would survive the death of any one artisan—for the group was the artist, and the group survived the individuals . . .

You didn’t need a mind to create order. In fact, the last thing you wanted was a mind in control, if that mind belonged to an ambitious idiot like Artorius.

“Listen to your sisters,” she said.

“Regina?”

“That’s all you need to do. And the mosaic will emerge . . .”

She slept.

Chapter 35

Chapter 35

Lucia arranged to meet Daniel at the Diocletian Baths. This was a monument just to the northwest of the Termini, Rome’s central station. She arrived early. It was a hot, humid August day, and the sky, laden with clouds, threatened rain.

She walked around the walls. These baths had been built in the fourth century, and like many of Rome’s later monuments they actually presented an ugly face to the world, great cliffs of red brickwork. Over the centuries such monuments had been steadily stripped of their marble, so that all that was left was a kind of skeleton of what had been.

But the monument was still massive, still enduring. Walls that had once been interior were now exterior, and she could make out the shapes of domes, broken open like eggs. The exedra, once an enclosed space surrounded by porticoes and seats where citizens would gather to talk, had been given over to a traffic-choked square.

The rain began to fall. She paid a few euros to enter the museum that had been built into the baths.

There were only a few tourists here. Bored attendants sat on plastic upright chairs, as still as robots switched off at the mains. The exhibits were sparse, cluttered together, and poorly labeled, for, she learned, the museum was in the middle of a long, slow process of being rehoused. Lucia wasn’t very interested.

At the center of the museum she found a kind of cloister, a colonnaded covered walkway surrounding a patch of green. More antique detritus had been gathered here, all unlabeled. There were fragments of statues, bits of fallen pillars, broken inscriptions whose huge lettering told of the size of the monuments they had once graced. Some of the monuments had been set in the garden, where they protruded from the untidy green.