The Hollow VeilThe Awakening
A Novel · Book One
No wall. No mist. No line holding her to anyone.
A city of old stone. A court that has ruled it for centuries. One woman it cannot hold.
Aveline Drakovich is twenty-four, a stone conservator who spends her days repointing tombstones at Stavropoleos and her Fridays alone with exactly one cup of tea. Then, on a wet November night in Bucharest, she crosses four meters of empty air to catch a falling delivery boy. Walkers leave a sigh in the stone. She leaves a silence.
Beneath the Uranus hill, the Court of Ash has ruled the city’s Veilborn for longer than the city has had a name worth remembering, every one of them bound to a High Sire whose grip is slipping. The Court gives Aveline a name: Unbound. The High Sire wants her found. His Liturgist wants her blessed. His Captain wants her buried before she learns what she is.
And Lucien Veyrath, who has walked through the city’s walls for a hundred and thirty-five years in a beautifully mended overcoat, has a day, perhaps less, to reach her first.
The Awakening is Book One of The Hollow Veil, a five-book series of old blood, older stone, and loyalty nobody commanded.
An imprint of Rustic Press
Everyone wants her
The Court of Ash gives her a name, Unbound, and four powers move at once.
The High Sire
wants her found.
His Liturgist
wants her blessed.
His Captain
wants her buried.
Lucien Veyrath
has a day, perhaps less, to reach her first.
Meet the Court of Ash
The people who decide what happens to her, with how to say their names. No spoilers.
Aveline Drakovich
ah-veh-LEEN DRAH-koh-vich
Twenty-four, a stone conservator who spends her days repointing tombstones at Stavropoleos. Then, one wet November night, she crosses four meters of empty air.
Lucien Veyrath
loo-SYAN vay-RAHT
Born in Lyon in 1855, he came to Bucharest to wall its river in brick. Now he walks through walls in a beautifully mended overcoat and apologizes with devastating courtesy. He does not own an umbrella.
Adrian Valea
ah-dree-AHN VAH-lyah
Notary to the Court since 1858, in an excellent suit sixty years out of date on purpose. Lucien’s partner of thirty-seven years, he believes in signatures, not saviors. Do take a biscuit.
Nour Haddad
NOOR hah-DAHD
Lucien’s best Walker and the fastest, rudest one in Bucharest. She calls him “bro” to annoy him, dives into walls like a swimmer off the high board, and films everything.
Dorina Cazacu
doh-REE-nah kah-ZAH-koo
The Court’s Surveyor, a seismologist who listens under Bucharest for the tiny sighs that Walkers make in stone. She believes in instruments, not miracles.
Father Ieronim
yeh-roh-NEEM
The Court’s Liturgist. He feeds the poor of Ferentari every Sunday and sits with the dying. He also comes in through your kitchen wall and pours your tea. Lucien fears no one more.
Vlaicu
VLY-koo
Captain of the Court’s Wardens, a veteran of Stalingrad who has not been seen to smile since 1944. He has done the arithmetic on the girl nobody holds.
The High Sire
the HIGH SIRE
He holds every Veilborn in the city by a rope he put into them the night they were carried. Frost creeps out from under his hands. He says only: find her.
The first line
“The dead man had been a night watchman, and the wall remembered him standing.”
Part One · The Unbound
Chapter One: The Hollow Veil
The dead man had been a night watchman, and the wall remembered him standing.
Lucien Veyrath crouched in the cellar beneath a bookbinder’s on Strada Lipscani, in the old heart of Bucharest, at half past nine on the last Friday of November, with his palm flat against the brick. He was trying to find out how a man had died down here. The brick was trying to tell him.
The wall knew more than the bookbinder did, and told it better. It knew two hundred years of damp. It knew barrels rolled down the steps and rolled up again empty; wine, then coal, then potatoes, then the bookbinder’s glue. And over all of it, still fresh, it knew a man in a reflective vest leaning his shoulder against this spot to light a cigarette, every night for six years, because it was the one corner the draft from the grating didn’t reach. The brick had his shoulder by heart.
It remembered his dog as well. Ursu: a brown mongrel of great dignity and no fixed ancestry, who had lain across the watchman’s boots every night and supervised the rats. Ursu had never once caught one. Nor had he ever conceded that catching them was the point.
Ursu had not been down here three nights ago. It was the only luck anyone had had in this cellar all month.
Three nights ago something had come down those steps and put a hand into the watchman.
Want the rest of Chapter One? It’s free, by email.
Free. You’ll also get occasional letters from Silas Fen (Rustic Embers). Unsubscribe any time.The rules of the Veil
Six words you’ll need on page one.
- The Veil
- The memory held in everything people have built. Every wall remembers the hands that raised it and the lives lived against it.
- Walker
- A Veilborn who can pass through walls. Inside the wall the body becomes mist, and leaves a residue in the stone like a hand pressed on a steamed mirror.
- Walled
- What happens to a Walker who stays past the breath. First you forget why you went in, then who you are, and then you are part of the wall.
- The sigh
- The sharp little spike in the noise of a building when a Walker goes into it, gone at once, almost before you can point at it. Instruments can hear it.
- The Mercy
- The old way of feeding: taking the last of a dying life, whole, from the first taste of milk to the last sight of the ceiling.
- Unbound
- The Sire’s word for one of the Veil whom his hold cannot reach. Now there is one.
The book’s full Terms of the Veil sit at the back, for easy reference.
Walk the city that remembers
Every place in the book is real, or was, before it was torn down.
Café Iris, Strada Covaci
Where the book opens, on a rainy Friday night in the Old Town.
Stavropoleos Monastery
Where Aveline repoints tombstones in the courtyard.
A bakery in Obor
Bread at three in the morning, and a saucer of salt by the back door.
The spring at Curtea de Argeș
Below the white monastery of the old ballad, at dawn.
The palm house
The Botanical Garden’s glasshouse, in Cotroceni.
The Uranus quarter
Bulldozed in the 1980s. Remembered under the boulevard.
The road ahead
Book One · Coming soon
The Awakening
A woman the Court of Ash cannot hold.
Book Two
The Unbuilt City
The remembered city is leaking. The streets Bucharest tore down are coming back after midnight.
Book Three
The Glass Accord
Book Four
The Keystones
Book Five
The Woman in the Wall
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