'The king!'

'I thought he'd be taller…'

'Jezal the Bastard.' Jezal snapped his head round, but there was no way of telling who spoke.

'That's Luthar!'

'A cheer for 'is Majesty!' Followed by a half-hearted murmur.

'This way,' said a pale-looking officer before the gate, indicating a staircase with one apologetic hand. Jezal climbed manfully, two stone steps at a time, spurs jingling. He came out onto the roof of the gatehouse and froze, his lip curling with distaste. Who should be standing there but his old friend Superior Glokta, bent over on his cane, his repulsive toothless smile on his face?

'Your Majesty,' he leered, voice heavy with irony. 'What an almost overwhelming honour.' He lifted his cane to point towards the far parapet. 'The Gurkish are that way.'

Jezal was attempting to frame a suitably acidic reply as his eyes followed Glokta's stick. He blinked, the muscles of his face going slack. He stepped past the cripple without saying a word. His scarred jaw crept gradually open, and stayed there.

'The enemy,' growled Varuz. Jezal tried to imagine what Logen Ninefingers would have said faced with the sight below him now.

'Shit.'

In the patchwork of damp fields, over the roads and through the hedgerows, between the farms and villages and the few coppices of old trees beyond the city walls, Gurkish troops swarmed in their thousands. The wide paved road towards Keln, curving away southwards through the flat farmland, was a single crawling, glittering, heaving river of marching men. Gurkish soldiers, in column, flooding up and flowing smoothly out to encircle the city in a giant ring of men, wood, and steel. Tall standards stood out above the boiling throng, golden symbols flashing in the watery autumn sunlight. The standards of the Emperor's legions. Jezal counted ten at his first glance.

'A considerable body of men,' said Bayaz, with awesome understatement.

Glokta grinned. 'The Gurkish hate to travel alone.'

The fence that Marshal Varuz had referred to earlier was already rising, a dark line winding through the muddy fields a few hundred strides from the walls, a shallow ditch in front of it. More than adequate to prevent supplies or reinforcements reaching the city from outside. Further away several camps were taking shape: vast bodies of white tents erected in neatly ordered squares, several with tall columns of dark smoke already floating up into the white sky from cook-fires and forges. There was a deeply worrying feeling of permanence about the whole arrangement. Adua might still have been in Union hands, but even the most patriotic liar could not have denied that the city's hinterland already belonged firmly to the Emperor of Gurkhul.

'You have to admire their organisation,' said Varuz grimly.

'Yes… their organisation…' Jezal's voice was suddenly creaky as old floorboards. Putting a brave face on this seemed more like insanity than courage.

A dozen horsemen had detached themselves from the Gurkish lines and now rode forward at a steady trot. Two long flags streamed above their heads, red and yellow silk, worked with Kantic characters in golden thread. There was a white flag too, so small as to be barely noticeable.