“Aiding and abetting the enemy,” said the constable, as if pronouncing a sartorial crime. “Is that a Rampini knockoff?”

“It’s an original,” said Brrr, letting it drop to the floor. The nakedness of Animals always made humans profoundly uncomfortable. It was the best he could do as a protest, given such short notice. “Am I allowed to dress myself?”

“We’re gentlemen here. Make it snappy, though.” CLAP HIM IN CHAINS said the caption that evening, and IF SIR BRRR LIKES STRIPES SO MUCH, WE CAN SHOW HER SOME STRIPES IN A PRISON GARMENT.

Clap some more as he is led to prison, was the point, and we go free for the virtue of our fingering him.

“I am only a delivery service,” Brrr declared to the court registrar. “You want the bankers, not me.”

The registrar raised her eyebrow. Brrr knew she was saying: Bankers are always pure. Bankers are purer than priests. Something about money insulates them in virtue.

“I charge you with fraud, to start with,” said the first magistrate he saw in Shiz, known as the doorbell magistrate for his job of cobbling together the initial court definition of an indictment. “You’re a villain.”

“I charge you with exaggeration,” shot back the Lion. “I’m a fall guy.”

The accusation of fraud was entered into the register-fraud perpetrated not against the victims, for some reason (who regards victims?), but against the banks themselves. Fraud in the service of treason. (Had he been turned in by one of his pool-hall cronies?) The complaints were written in such convoluted language that Brrr couldn’t follow them. Nonetheless, his gizzard seemed cooked, but good.

His offer to pay back to the banks any funds deemed to have been illegally skimmed off the released Animal accounts was met with “no comment.” The court wasn’t in a mood for bargaining. Brrr spent a few weeks in a holding pen, no worse a lodging than that old ministerial croft in which Professor Lenx and Mister Mikko were entering their dotage. One night the Lion was bundled into a special convicts’ train that traveled at midnight from Shiz to the capital. Within a mile or two of the Emperor’s Palace, Brrr knew, hunched Southstairs, the underground prison carved on the site of a megalithic tomb. He imagined the place as a massive mouth of Oz. It ground its stony gullet, waiting for Brrr’s carcass.

But there were a few steps to endure first, the joke of applying for an appeal in the Emerald City, the punishment of having to wait for a hearing until the meanest magistrate was free of social obligations. The usual foul skirmishes.

By dint of the judgment against him his assets were frozen pending appropriation. (Someone had to pay for his incarceration in Southstairs, and better the accused than the state.) He wasn’t a lamb thrown to the lions-he knew that-he was a Lion thrown to the lethal but dominant Lambs of the Unnamed God.

Then, if you could call it that, a stroke of luck at last. Someone serving as a Friend of the Court had recognized him in chambers; it was the Margreave of Tenmeadows, a Gillikinese noble named Avaric. For his own amusement if nothing else, Avaric worked in Secret Affairs, an arm of the Palace defense team. Before Brrr’s final appeal review could be canceled due to insufficient cause, and before he could be led off to prison, Avaric arranged a meeting between the criminal and the sentencing judge, a professional scold named Miss Eldersdotter. At the Court’s discretion the Margreave was allowed to attend.