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exasperating to Chert. The Jaw was less put out. As the monster got back to her feet, eyeing them cautiously, he said, in the Overhill tongue, “How do you fight them?”
    “Head destroy,” she said. “In the distance, to destroy from. Fire with. Small, tight, strong fire.”
    The phrase “small, tight, strong fire” would have been meaningless, if they hadn’t seen the red lances emanating from the smooth floating stone. “But the bodies live on,” said Chert, in Overhill, thinking of the crawling arm and the corpse that had continued to drag itself along. “Even after the head is gone, the body lives.”
    Her eyes clouded as she deciphered his speech; once she understood, she shook her head and said, “Not long times that it lives, after head.”
    That was good news, if true. The Jaw spoke: “Give us the small tight strong fire.”
    Chert reflected that it was his son who was asking the most important questions, not himself. He felt a mixture of pride, and anger at being bested.
    The monster was nodding enthusiastically. But what she said was, “Is danger. Must learn. Is the time for to teach.”
    The Jaw looked at Chert. The anger at his father seemed to have been forgotten in the midst of a newfound, dark enthusiasm. “That makes sense,” he said in the People’s tongue. “A new weapon should mean new skills.”
    Chert nodded slowly. It would be good to have access to the fire weapon, in case they met more of the undead things; and it would be handy magic to have, when they were trying to persuade a strange band to take them in. But he wasn’t particularly happy with the notion of following this new monster someplace and spending months with her while she trained them.
    Which was exactly what she seemed to have in mind. “Came,” she said, stepping back in the direction she’d come from and waving them to follow. “Came.” She was trying to tell them to come. “From this place, away is the safer.” Chert wasn’t sure he was going to obey, but the Jaw moved after her with no hesitation. Biting down on his irritation, Chert fell into step as well.
    Out of habit, Chert and the Jaw moved so as not to leave too obvious a trail. But it was wasted effort, because the monster crashed so messily through the woods that it was almost as if they were following a bear, or a huge stumbling baby. Chert stared at her stone head-garb and her impossible hide, and thought about the hard unmelting ice protecting her face, and wondered how a creature so stupid could have come across such powerful tools.
    He said to the Jaw, “Do you think it’s wise to follow this monster?”
    “She looks human to me. She looks like one of you, only with the color of a Big-Brow.”
    Chert’s mouth puckered in annoyance to hear his son refer to humans as “you,” thus perversely identifying himself with his Big-Brow blood. “Human or spirit or monster or witch, I see no reason why we should so casually follow her.”
    The Jaw scowled at him. “What do you mean? We’re following so as to learn to use the strong tight fire. So we can kill those things that will not die.”
    The monster peered at them over her shoulder, probably anxiously wondering what they were talking about in their foreign tongue. Chert pretended not to notice her curiosity. “I say we would be better served by getting far away from here. Why should we risk our lives trying to kill the undead?”
    “Because they killed our People. Because they killed my mother. Are you a coward?”
    Chert refrained from pointing out that by rights Gash-Eye should have been executed anyway. And falling prey to those monsters was a better fate than what Spear had planned for her. “We’re hunters,” he said. “What can we do with those things after we kill them? Eat them? I wouldn’t eat them.”
    “No, we’re not going to eat them. We’re going to destroy them so they can never harm us again.”
    “A better way to keep them from harming us would be to go far away.