Perrin Voss walked out of the Deep Mist two winters ago, at the edge of the Tally Reaches on the Sixth Ring of the World Engine, with no memory of the year before it and a pale, keyhole-shaped birthmark on the inside of his left wrist that he does not remember getting. He had three brass bells on a leather cord, a cracked gear-tooth, and a hand-worn brass gaming die — and nothing else.
The first town he came to was Hollowmere, on the shore of a grey lake, where a mist-touched child called Nib watched him for three days before speaking to him, because the child could hear the Deep Mist counting him and wanted to know what number it had given.
Perrin does not remember the Deep Mist counting him. He does not remember that it counted him twice — once going in, twelve years ago, and once coming back, two winters ago — because the second count is the one that erased the first. He believes he is a man who walked into the Mist and lost his memory. He is, in truth, a man who was taken into the Mist by Warden-Prime Elowen Vane, remade as a key — a key of flesh and fog and key-metal, grown by the Deep Mist itself over the course of a year — and walked back out when the key was not needed. Yet.
The Deep Mist is alive. It is a single living mind that hangs outside the World Engine — a sphere of brass and iron a thousand miles across, divided into one hundred Slivers locked into seven concentric rings around a core of light — and it has been eating the unkeyed Slivers one by one as the Grand Cage, the great lid that holds it back, begins to fail. The Mist does not hurry.
It does not speak in words. It sings, and it counts, and what it counts, it keeps. Perrin was counted twice because the Mist does not count the same thing twice — and the fact that it counted him twice means that the thing that went in and the thing that came out are, in the Mist's tally, two different entries. Perrin does not know this. He only knows that he cannot sleep in silence, that iron rings when he is frightened, and that the hum in his bones has been getting louder since the town of Tallymarket lurched two fingers to the north.
Perrin's bloodline is not a bloodline at all — it is a grafting. The 'brass-and-fog drake' ancestor that his sorcerous power flows from is not a creature that existed; it is the key-metal that the Deep Mist grew inside him during his lost year, which the Mist shaped into a lineage so that his magic would have somewhere to come from. His familiar, Chime — a fist-sized knot of grey fog around a slowly turning brass gear — is not a construct he summoned but a fragment of that key-metal which separated from him and took the shape of a familiar because his erased memory could not hold it. Chime never sleeps and only hums, because it is still counting, and it will stop humming the day the count is finished.
Since walking out of the Mist, Perrin has been drifting the Tally Reaches — the outermost inhabited ring of the World Engine, a frontier of small farming and mining Slivers strung along a single long road, where the people count everything because counting is how you know a Sliver is still keyed. He takes work that keeps him near the fog line: lamp-tending, orchard-watching, tally-copying in the brass-floored counting houses.
He is good at the work — his lost year gave him a scholar's habits, Arcana and History and calligraphy he cannot remember learning — and he is careful never to stay anywhere longer than a season, because staying means being counted, and being counted means being kept.
Two winters of drifting have given Perrin a wry, restless manner and a habit of hiding his fear behind chatter. He is fiercely kind to anyone the Mist has touched — the mist-touched, the fog-marked, the people who hear the singing — because he believes they are the only people who understand what he is. He never lies about what he remembers, because he remembers so little, and the honesty has made him trusted in the small towns of the Sixth Ring even as it has made him a subject of quiet suspicion among the Keywardens, who have a file on every person who has ever walked out of the Deep Mist, and whose file on Perrin Voss is stamped with a number: 447.
Perrin's driving goal is to find out what the Deep Mist took from him, why it let him walk back out, and whether the hum in his bones is a gift, a debt or a countdown. He does not yet know that the answer to all three questions is the same: the Mist took a year from him and grew a key in its place, it let him go because the key was not yet needed, and the hum is the key turning in a lock that has not been built yet — a lock that the Ratchet Crew's unkeying engine is very close to finishing, and that the Threshold of Keys has been waiting twelve thousand years to receive.
