It also holds a knife for pointing pens and the small bottle of black ink (more than half full) into which I dip mine. See how much darker my writing has become.

It is facts I need-facts I starve for. To Green with fancies!

My name is Horn.

This is such a pen case as students use in Viron, the city in which I was born, and no doubt in many others-a case of black leather glued over pressboard; it has a brass hinge with a steel spring, and a little brass clamp to keep it shut. We sold them in our shop and asked six cardbits; but my father would accept four if the purchaser bargained awhile, and such purchasers always did.

Three, if they bought something else, a quire of writing paper, say.

The leather is badly scuffed. More facts later, when I have more time. Rajya Mantri wants to lecture me.

Reviewing what I wrote yesterday, I see that I have begun without plan or foresight, and in fact without the least notion of what I was trying to do or why I was trying to do it. That is how I have begun everything in life. Perhaps I need to begin before I can think clearly about the task. The chief thing is to begin, after all-after which the chief thing is to finish. I have finished worse than I began, for the most part.

It is all in the pen case. You have to take out the ink and string it together into the right shapes. That is all.

If I had not picked up this old pen case where my father’s shop once stood, it is possible that I might still be searching for Silk.

For the phantom who has eluded me on three whorls.

Silk may be here on Blue already, after all. I have dispatched letters to Han and some other towns, and we will see. It is convenient, I find, to have messengers at one’s beck and call.

So I am searching here, although I am the only person here in Gaon who could not tell you where to find him. Searching does not necessarily imply movement. Thinking it does, or rather assuming it without thought, may have been my first and worst mistake.