As long as they're there to make a deal.

He doesn't need to know what they're saying. If they're not here to pay a ransom or danegeld for the invasion, then he couldn't reach a deal in the first place, so it's not his fault for not managing it. He just has to assume that's what they're trying to get across, respond accordingly, and then see if he can find an offer they'll accept for that cart of treasure? At least if they refuse, that much should be understandable. And he can always blame their recalcitrance or greed for the impossibility of getting an offer, nobody would expect him to dishonor the legion by accepting them cheating him.

One of his subordinates is to fetch some of the prisoners; it won't be who they want, but if he's right he might elicit a description.

They're missing a lot of words there, but they're pretty sure that one approximately means grab/locate/obtain, and from the response the rest of the sentence is some kind of request or imperative?

They don't have a lot of time to ponder it. It's only about a minute and a half before the tent flap reopens, and the assistant from before returns, this time with company.

One of them is another soldier of the sort they've seen so many of so far - human, a bit below average in height, wearing the same armor as almost all his fellows and a spear in hand. He might not attract so much attention, though, not when compared to the people he's escorting at a stance too relaxed to properly be called spearpoint; with him are two humans in some sort of cheap clothing and bound with metal fetters. The one on the right has a couple of bruises, but the one on the left is uninjured; absent any real criteria by which to pick someone out, they just grabbed two of the most cooperative ones.

Part of Callim is still waiting for the point where everyone takes off the disguises to laugh at the look on his face, but the rest of him knows better - it might bear some superficial similarities, but this is just too much for a prank. He's been dragged out of a restaurant while being threatened with large knives by people who don't speak baseline, pinned against the ground, stripped of his clothing, and then dragged off in chains. He's tried protesting against the treatment. He's tried the universal safeword, with no results, and when he decided to simply refuse cooperating they hit him with sticks until he thought better of it. It took about ten minutes of this for him to first go Tsi-Imbi, when he had to confront the fact that this wasn't an attempt to make his life surreal, and he's repeated the call a dozen times since in the vain hope that he just hadn't managed to properly vocalize things before. Either this is real, or it's something that's sufficiently bad it'll take more than just hours to help him at. (He's never heard of a mental breakdown that would be like this, but he's not an expert in it, and part of the problem with altered cognition is that it might interfere with his ability to recognize the problem).

The fact that he can understand the other dath ilani prisoners he meets and parse their words just fine, and that the ones he meets seem just as frightened and confused as he is, is not a good sign either. He has no idea* what is happening in the world where it's real, or how things will change going forwards. About the only good thing he can say about the situation is that they don't seem to want him dead, since they mostly seem to hit him when he fails to be sufficiently cooperative and they at least got around to feeding him some unappetizing gruel with a bizarre set of utensils some time late last evening.

All of which is to say, when the people he can't understand round up him and a number of other people to get crowded into another room, or when he's one of two people separated out from that group to march to yet a third location, he lacks the predictions of impending doom that would really allow it to properly qualify as dread, but that's not to say he's optimistic. What do they even want from him?

*The stronger form, where no plausible hypothesis seems to predict this outcome in advance, rather than the more ordinary confusion of merely having insufficient evidence to distinguish between hypotheses.