Angua noticed that Carrot was walking better even as they reached the forest below the falls, and the shovel over his shoulder hardly burdened him at all.
There were wolf prints all over the snow.
"They won"t have stayed," she said, as they walked between the trees. "They felt things keenly when he died but... wolves look to the future. They don"t try to remember things."
"They"re lucky," said Carrot.
"They"re realistic. It"s just that the future contains the next meal and the next danger. Is your arm all right?"
"It feels as good as new."
They found the freezing mass of fur lying at the water"s edge. Carrot pulled it out of the water, scraped off the snow higher up the shingle, and started to dig.
After a while he took off his shirt. The bruises were already fading.
Angua sat and looked over the water, listening to the thud of the spade and the occasional grunt when Carrot hit a tree root. Then she heard the soft slither of something being pulled over snow, a pause, and then the sound of sand and stones being shovelled into a hole.
"Do you want to say a few words?" said Carrot.
"You heard the howl last night. That"s how wolves do it," said Angua, still looking out across the water. "There aren"t any other words."
"Perhaps just a moment"s silence, then - "
She spun round. "Carrot! Don"t you remember last night? Didn"t you wonder what I might become? Didn"t you worry about the future?"
"No."
"Why the hell not?"
"It hasn"t happened yet. Shall we get back? It"ll be dark soon."
"And tomorrow?"
"I"d like you to come back to Ankh-Morpork."
"Why? There"s nothing for me there."
Carrot patted the soil over the grave. "Is there anything left for you here?" he said. "Besides, I - "
Don"t you dare say the words, Angua thought. Not at a time like this. werewolf fights werewolf, there are advantages to either shape. It"s an eternal struggle to get a position where hands beat claws. And body shapes have lives of their own, a dangerous attribute if it is allowed to act unchecked. A cat"s instinct is to jump on something that moves, but this is not a correct action if what is moving has a fizzing fuse. The mind has to fight its own body for control and the other body for survival. Mix this together, and the noise suggests that there are four creatures in the whirling ball of rage. And each one of them has brought several friends. And none of them like any of the others.
A shadow made Vimes spin around. Detritus, in shining armour, was aiming the _ Piecemaker over the banister.
"Sergeant! No! You"ll hit Angua too!"
"Not a problem, sir," said Detritus, "cos it won"t kill "em, so all we have to do, see, is sort out der bits dat are Wolfgang an" belt him over der head when he gets himself back together - "
"If you fire that in here his bits will be mixed up with our bits and there won"t be big bits! Put the damn thing down!"
Wolfgang couldn"t control his shape well, Vimes saw. He couldn"t quite manage to be full wolf or full human, and Angua was making the most of that. She was ducking, weaving... biting.
But even if you put him down you couldn"t put him out.
"Mister Vimes!" Now it was Cheery, beckoning urgently from the passage that led to the kitchen. "You ought to come here right now!"
She was white-faced. Vimes nudged Detritus. "If they separate, just grab him, right? Just try to hold him still!"
Igor was lying in the kitchen surrounded by broken, glass. Wolfgang must have landed on him and taken out his perpetual anger on a soft target. The patchwork man was bleeding heavily and lay like a doll that had been flung hard against a wall. "Marthter," he groaned.