'Then we will come,' murmured Khalul's first apprentice, frowning up from under his fine black brows. 'We have been preparing long years to do it.'

The two men fell to sullen glaring, and Jezal frowned with them. He resented the sudden feeling that the whole business was somehow an argument between Bayaz and this priest and that he, although a king, was like a child eavesdropping on his parents' conversation, and with just as little say in the outcome.

'Speak your terms, General!' he bellowed down.

Malzagurt cleared his throat. 'Firstly, if you surrender the city of Adua to the Emperor, he is prepared to allow you to retain your throne, as his subject, of course, paying regular tribute.'

'How generous of him. What of the traitor, Lord Brock? We understood that you have promised him the crown of the Union.'

'We are not altogether committed to Lord Brock. He does not hold the city, after all. You do.'

'And we have scant respect for those who turn on their own masters,' added Mamun, with a dark look up at Bayaz.

'Secondly, the citizens of the Union will be permitted to continue to live according to their own laws and customs. They will continue to live in freedom. Or as close to it as they have ever really been, at least.'

'Your generosity is astonishing.' Jezal had meant to sneer it, but in the end it escaped without much irony.

'Thirdly,' shouted the General, with a nervous glance sideways towards Mamun, 'the man known as Bayaz, the First of the Magi, be delivered over to us, bound and in chains, that he may be conveyed to the Temple of Sarkant, for judgement by the Prophet Khalul. Those are our terms. Refuse them, and the Emperor has decreed that Midderland shall be treated as any other conquered province. Many will be killed, and many more made slaves, Gurkish governors will be installed, your Agriont will be made a temple, and your current rulers… conveyed to cells beneath the Emperor's palace.'

Jezal half opened his mouth to refuse on an instinct. Then he paused. Harod the Great, no doubt, would have spat his defiance at any odds, and probably pissed on the emissary to boot. The slightest notion of negotiating with the Gurkish was against every long-held belief he possessed.