Linewalker

Veya Marn reads a fever in a marker stone with two bare fingers, because stone is honest about a fever. On Vesh there is no weather, only maintenance: the world's core was tapped centuries ago, its warmth pushed up the veins to buy some paying world an early spring, and the linewalkers keep the last lines open by hand so the town does not die in the dark. She should have been her family's pride. A childhood assay accident half-burned her; she healed miswired, and the Guild's instruments rated her four-tenths and set her aside as spoilt. Then the tithe assay comes down, and her brother Joren tests true. One brother against a generation of open vein for the whole town: Joren does the arithmetic himself, finds himself a fair price, and goes willingly. Veya does not accept the arithmetic. She stows away on the barge carrying the year's Candles up out of the cold. Topside, the barge is liturgy. Below, it is plumbing. What she finds wired into the conduit cannot be pulled free without freezing a town by morning. How much is one person allowed to cost?