'All right. She was born to a dead woman – Whiskeyjack's stepmother, she died that morning, and the baby – Dunsparrow – well, she was long in coming out, she should have died inside, if you know what I mean.

That's why the town elders gave her up to the temple, to Hood's own.

The father was already dead, killed outside Quon, and Whiskeyjack, well, he was finishing his prenticeship. We was young then. So me and him, we had to break in and steal her back, but she'd already been consecrated, blessed in Hood's name – so we took its power away by talking about it, ha ha, making light and all that, and she grew up normal enough. More or less. Sort of…' He trailed away, refused to meet the two sets of staring eyes, then scratched at his singed face.

'We need us a Deck of Dragons, I think…'

Apsalar, four paces behind the trio, smiled as the wizard and assassin both simultaneously cuffed Sergeant Fiddler. A short-lived smile. Such revelations were troubling. Whiskeyjack had always been more than a little reticent about where he'd come from, about the life before he became a soldier. Mysteries as locked away as the ruins beneath the sands. He'd been a mason, once, a worker in stone. She knew that much.

A fraught profession among the arcana of divination and symbolism.

Builder of barrows, the one who could make solid all of history, every monument to grandeur, every dolmen raised in eternal gestures of surrender. There were masons among many of the Houses in the Deck of Dragons, a signifier of both permanence and its illusion. Whiskeyjack, a mason who set his tools down, to embrace slaughter. Was it Hood's own hand that guided him?

It was believed by many that Laseen had arranged Dassem Ultor's death, and Dassem had been the Mortal Sword of Hood – in reality if not in name – and the centre of a growing cult among the ranks of the Malazan armies. The empire sought no patron from among the gods, no matter how seductive the invitation, and in that Laseen had acted with singular wisdom, and quite possibly at the command of the Emperor. Had Whiskeyjack belonged to Dassem's cult? Possibly – still, she had seen nothing to suggest that was so. If anything, he had been a man entirely devoid of faith.

Nor did it seem likely that the Queen of Dreams would knowingly accept the presence of an avatar of Hood within her realm. Unless the two gods are now allies in this war. The very notion of war depressed her, for gods were as cruel and merciless as mortals. Whiskeyjack's sister may be as much an unwitting player in all this as the rest of us. She was not prepared to condemn the woman, and not yet ready to consider her an ally, either.

She wondered again at what Kalam and Quick Ben were planning. Both were formidable in their own right, yet intrinsic in their methods was staying low, beneath notice. What was obvious – all that lay on the surface – was invariably an illusion, a deceit. When the time came to choose sides, out in the open, they were likely to surprise everyone.

Two men, then, whom no-one could truly trust. Two men whom not even the gods could trust, for that matter.

She realized that, in joining this column, in coming among these soldiers, she had become ensnared in yet another web, and there was no guarantee she would be able to cut herself free. Not in time.

The entanglement worried her. She could not be certain that she'd walk away from a fight with Kalam. Not a fight that was face to face, that is. And now his guard was up. In fact, she'd invited it. Partly from bravado, and partly to gauge his reaction. And just a little… misdirection.

Well, there was plenty of that going round.

The two undead lizards, Curdle and Telorast, were maintaining some distance from the party of soldiers, although Apsalar sensed that they were keeping pace, somewhere out in the scrubland south of the raised road. Whatever their hidden motives in accompanying her, they were for the moment content to simply follow. That they possessed secrets and a hidden purpose was obvious to her, as was the possibility that that purpose involved, on some level, betrayal. And that too is something that we all share.

Sergeant Balm was cursing behind Bottle as they walked the stony road.

Scorched boots, soles flapping, mere rags covering the man's shoulders beneath the kiln-hot sun, Balm was giving voice to the miseries afflicting everyone who had crawled out from under Y'Ghatan. Their pace was slowing, as feet blistered and sharp rocks cut into tender skin, and the sun raised a resisting wall of blinding heat before them. Clawing through it had become a vicious, enervating struggle.

Where others among the squads carried children, Bottle found himself carrying a mother rat and her brood of pups, the former perched on his shoulder and the latter swathed in rags in the crook of one arm. More sordid than comic, and even he could see that, but he would not relinquish his new… allies.

Striding at Bottle's side was the halfblood Seti, Koryk. Freshly adorned in human finger bones and not much else. He'd knotted them in the singed strands of his hair, and with each step there was a soft clack and clatter, the music grisly to Bottle's ears.

Koryk carried more in a clay pot with a cracked rim that he'd found in the pit of a looted grave. No doubt he planned on distributing them to the other soldiers. As soon as we've found enough clothes to wear.

He caught a skittering sound off among the withered scrub to his left.

Those damned lizard skeletons. Chasing down my scouts. He wondered to whom they belonged. Reasonable to assume they were death-aspected, which possibly made them servants of Hood. He knew of no mages among the squads who used Hood's Warren – then again those who did rarely advertised the fact. Maybe that healer, Deadsmell, but why would he want familiars now? He sure didn't have them down in the tunnels.

Besides, you'd need to be a powerful mage or priest to be able to conjure up and bind two familiars. No, not Deadsmell. Who, then?

Quick Ben. That wizard had far too many warrens swirling round him.

Fiddler had vowed to drag Bottle up to the man, and that was an introduction Bottle had no desire to make. Fortunately, the sergeant seemed to have forgotten his squad, caught up as he was in this sordid reunion of old-timers.

'Hungry enough yet?' Koryk asked.

Startled, Bottle glanced over at the man. 'What do you mean?'

'Skewered pinkies to start, then braised rat – it's why you've brought them along, isn't it?'

'You're sick.'

Just ahead, Smiles turned to fling back a nasty laugh. 'Good one. You can stop now, Koryk – you've reached your quota for the year. Besides, Bottle ain't gonna eat them rats. He's married the momma and adopted the whelps – you missed the ceremony, Koryk, when you was off hunting bones. Too bad, we all cried.'

'We missed our chance,' Koryk said to Bottle. 'We could've beat her unconscious and left her in the tunnels.'

A good sign. Things are getting back to normal. Everything except the haunted look in the eyes. It was there, in every soldier who'd gone through the buried bones of Y'Ghatan. Some cultures, he knew, used a ritual of burial and resurrection to mark a rite of passage. But if this was a rebirth, it was a dour one. They'd not emerged innocent, or cleansed. If anything, the burdens seemed heavier. The elation of having survived, of having slipped out from the shadow of Hood's Gates, had proved woefully shortlived.

It should have felt… different. Something was missing. The Bridgeburners had been forged by the Holy Desert Raraku – so for us, wasn't Y'Ghatan enough? It seemed that, for these soldiers here, the tempering had gone too far, creating something pitted and brittle, as if one more blow would shatter them.