On what authority? He’d had a conversion. The Unnamed God had chosen him to lead Oz. The Unnamed God had selected in Shell a servant and a steward of this great people, this deserving nation, this heap of goodness, this blessed verdant pasture ringed by stinging deserts…well, the rhetoric was almost as bountiful as the moral surcease with which Oz credited itself.

Brrr took little notice, except to be glad he hadn’t needed to approach the Palace of the Emperor of Oz. Instead, he involved himself in more traditional credits of the double-entry bookkeeping sort.

The banks didn’t like seeing their deposits dwindle, but those in the know were always muttering about the cost of an impending military strike. Who could say when deposits might be impounded by the Throne for the purpose of funding the army? If the banks could charge 30 percent for every withdrawal by an Animal and then use magical accounting to disappear their earnings as thoroughly as Ozma herself had been disappeared, they were in some ways ahead.

Any in-house scruples were easily suppressed. A certain Loyalist strain had never accepted that Shiz banks should be holding Animal funds in the first place. Tainted!

So the banks prospered in the short term, and hid their gains; the Animals received some capital after a long period of penury; and Brrr thrived. His own account accumulated like-well, like magic. He paid off old debts involving Ampleton Quarters, and he invested shrewdly in the less gaudy of Hiiri Furkenstael’s gilded engravings. Not for trade, but for his own pleasure.

The Lion ran into Piarsody Scallop one afternoon at the Fine Engraving Exchange this side of Ticknor Circus. She had not aged well, growing purple in the face and kitted out in an unsuitably girlish gown, all white ruches and pink furbelows. Her boot was undone because she suffered from elephant ankle. The malady forced one shoulder lower to the floor than the other, but Miss Scallop bolted upright with surprise to see him. She came stumping across the sawdusty floor with both hands flung in the air as if she were about to hurl a watermelon. He cut her.

He lived it up, he put on weight, becoming almost portly as befitted a gentleman in middle age. He ate well. It showed.

He called it gravitas, but it was mostly gravy. He was swimming in gravy.

Until the gravy boat spilled him.

It happened so slowly this time, so genteelly, that he didn’t even see it coming. He paid little attention to conversations in the club about the need of an Animal workforce to shore up the Gillikinese manufacturing sector. No significant improvement noted in that area yet, worried the captains of industry. But Sir Brrr-he used the title now-didn’t feel implicated. For one thing, he wasn’t a laborer himself, as was patently clear. For the second, though he had initially proposed to the Shiz banks that a loosening of monetary policy would result in a rise of Animal workers hunting for jobs, the bankers seemed to be exercising due patience. The banks were still culling huge fees from the withdrawals. “What do they have to complain about?” he muttered to his valet, expecting no answer. Flyswatter gave him none.