Sunk in a fug of self-loathing, he’d bypassed Tenniken entirely. Paid the conductor extra to stay on to Shiz. (No other Animals rode the train that day, though, sealed into his own mortification, he hadn’t noticed. Later, he wondered if some good burgher of Traum had bribed the conductor to allow Brrr to board at all, just to get him out of the vicinity.)

Still, the sight of the outskirts of the ancient university town caught Brrr’s attention, drawing him out of his funk. He peered through the grimy train windows. First, the great manufacturing plants. Brick factories with glass transoms, spewing noxious plumes out of zigzaggy smokestacks. Closer to the city-centre, terraced housing for millworkers. Their laundry yards swarmed with small human cubs, at play with their skipping ropes and stones.

And then into the close, gnarled, ancient university center of Shiz. Its separate colleges in promiscuous adjacency. Each boasted an ivy-clawed gatehouse through which passersby could glimpse serene quadrangles…brilliant chapels, lecture halls…science labs chasing the latest developments in two dozen separate branches of enquiry.

The Lion had taken stock of the smart little city, the jewel of the province of Gillikin. He’d explored its nests of colleges and its clubs and its manicured parks and canals, and then he’d set himself up in a better class of residence. Not far from Ticknor Circus, with its array of bistros and bathhouses. A sunny, top-floor den in a purpose-built brick mansion block called Ampleton Quarters. Suite 1904. Fully furnished and featuring the most up-to-the-tiktok in water closets.

Was he aware that he might be trading on a reputation as the very Lion who had inadvertently advanced the Wizard’s plans in the emerald trade, helping to squelch the spontaneous labor revolt? Innocent as he was, it would have been hard for him to discern the ways in which he was receiving undue advantage. His first time in a city-or the first time that he could remember. No other Lions seemed to live in Ampleton Quarters; but then, he tended to hurry to his flat, and avoided the biweekly tenants’ meetings because he didn’t want to be bullied into serving on any committees.

He kept his mouth closed as much as possible. And comparatively speaking, a Lion cuts a fine figure; the world admires a glossy mane, a sultry-surly growl. One can make an impression without saying much, and Brrr learned that he was not bad-looking, as Lions go.

But being good-looking has its own penalties. The public will not let a comely face walk by anonymously; it must find out who owns it. By the end of his first social season in Shiz, Brrr had made the grade. He enjoyed the occasional off-night, back-alley shenanigans but he built a more formal life on the strength of his reputation as a hero.

He didn’t consider marriage. He didn’t have the stomach for it. Instead, he invested his little nest egg in a portfolio of diversified stocks managed by a Shiz bank called the Gold Standard. In the first few years it swelled agreeably. While the rest of Oz was still suffering the effects of the long drought, and farmsteads in Munchkinland were being repossessed for back taxes, the industrial base of Gillikin allowed waistlines to amplify and chins to double. Brrr grew prosperous, and lived like it. He kept to himself. Cultivating the reputation of a mystery presence about town, he avoided close contact of a genuinely intimate nature, and therefore-he hoped-he might be excused for failing to see the social coercion, the repression on which the Shiz haut monde was built.