"The Ice Maidens come over here and practice their fine control sculpting, occasionally. The palace we just passed is the royal residence for visits to Erengrad, so it's a good place to show off. The Gardens of Ursun are a little farther on."

That does actually make it better. "So, about how often do things like the mess that brought us here happen?"

"Someone trying to summon daemons and coming at least that close to succeeding? Once or twice a year across all of Kislev, if it got much higher we would get worried Chaos was planning something big and burning reserves they couldn't easily get back to do it. Higher in the Empire, I think, but if you measure per person instead of per acre probably not much higher. Most of those attempts, but not by much, succeed in getting something small; most failures just backfire and kill everyone involved and most nearby. Summoning that starts a ritual but fails much sooner, probably triple that rate, and triple again for those who start planning but are caught before they start." If they 'start planning' but not in such a way that produces a success below the Night Wind's notice or draws it, he doesn't know but also expects that he doesn't, particularly, care. He did run into that once when a chekist stumbled on it.

"If you mean going wrong this weirdly, much less; I haven't heard of it but it wouldn't shock me. If you made me pick a proportion I'd guess once in a hundred failures but I wouldn't dare place a bet on that either way." He should ask the Verenans to consult their southern counterparts, actually.

"The first was closer to what I was asking. I think you said you didn't expect anything to come up for another couple weeks but I imagine from how you just elaborated that whatever would be coming up is less of a crisis?"

"Well, usually. But if there's something looking dangerous in Praag, for example, that needed a serious response, I'd hear in the afternoon, pack that night, and be off on a storm-hooved horse at first light to get there by dusk, because it probably isn't this bad but they won't know yet. The Lady Kajetana's agents handle almost all of these, and there aren't that many of us who are skilled to both track down the site quickly and fight what comes out if we're late. And that's happening around once a month except during the winter."

Sheppard thinks for a moment. "Is it more in winter because of desperation or less because it's harder to do anything?"

"Less. Harder to do anything, much harder to hide it. Some of them out on the oblasts plan to try things in the winter because it's harder to get to and stop, but Ice Witches are more powerful then, and Storm Witches on their horses can gallop through blizzards to stop them anyway without even the horses getting chills."

Sheppard nods. "Mobility isn't always the most important thing on a battlefield but most of the time it helps a lot. And if you can see and move while your opponents can't. Well, I can see why they aren't nearly as threatening."

"Indeed. I understand we haven't always been organized this way, Tzar Boris's father didn't tolerate Ice Witches at all and they were outlawed under the Vampire Tzarina before him, but there has almost always been something like us made up of Storm Witches and whoever they picked as their covert investigators, because they're fantastically mobile year-round."

"If they were outlawed was that fortress we visited built since then?"

"Rebuilt under Tzar Boris, and I understand they spent quite a while unsealing everything which had once been sealed against Kattarin the Bloody as well. I doubt it's the first time; it doesn't melt, but I suspect any time a witch with a claim to be one of the greatest ever lives, she attempts to prove it by rebuilding Frosthome taller and more beautiful."

"Wait, by rebuilt do you mean from scratch or just repaired and improved on?"

"Under Tzar Boris, from scratch. That was a bare hill that made everyone nervous to walk on for two centuries, nothing more."

"Oh, so the underground parts were probably there just magically hidden."

"Sealed, and anyone who knows anything more about what's under the hill is ill-advised to speak about it in public."

"Right, sorry."

"I take no offense."

"Then we appreciate the recommendation."

"Thank you."

Hopefully the silence doesn't stay too tense, but either way they'll pass over to the Garden of Ursun soon.

It's not wild. It's trying to be, and if you grew up in New York City and didn't take upstate vacations or anything, you might entirely miss that it wasn't succeeding, despite the visible city walls looming over the east edge of the garden, because it's doing pretty well. But it's not wild.

There are trees, and they're not even in orderly lines like planned woods, but they're also far too close in age and a little too uniform in how the species are intermixed. There is large unworked stone, and most of it probably was always in roughly the place it is now, but there are hints around that it's not quite unworked and has been slightly cut and moved. There are paths meant to look like large game trails, but they're a little too convenient. Also there's one solid actual road going through it, from a gate in the wall, but, you know, Central Park has that too.

It is, however, good at projecting that feeling that really old mountains, remote islands, and redwood groves tend to give off, where the place feels old and not made by mortal hands. Even if it's not true. And the shape of the hills, which rise upward from the plain of the city to have the highest part of the city walls built on them, seems like it's been basically untouched, and the woods and stone and other wild gardening shaped around that.

If the scanner checks, it will see that, except the tenth of it that's north of the road, the park has low concentrations of a third 'polarization' of the divine energy cluster, slightly more similar to Ice Magic than the other 'polarizations', and that it increases as you get closer to a particular point in the middle of the hills, getting higher than the built temples by about a factor of three.

"Nice park, I take it that's it's been here for a while?"

"At least since the last time Erengrad was sacked from the land, which was centuries ago. It's where most ceremonies of Ursun are held, in the city - not everyone goes out into the wild but they can at least come here into the half-wild. There're even wild animals in the forest, though there's only one bear allowed and he's under the priest's gaze except when he's hibernating."

"So it's like one big outdoor temple then? It reads a bit like the other ones we visited."

"More or less, yes. I'm less surprised than for the others; the Garden gives people a more tangible sense of sacredness than any temple I've been in, especially toward the heart-cave."

"I think I can tell where that is too. The highest concentration is probably this heart-cave."