Chapter 29 Down from the Dhars

The torchlight found me before the voices did.

I was still sitting with my back against the painted wall, one hand on my belly, the other pressed flat to ochre horses that had galloped through ten thousand years without arriving anywhere. Asdar had gone quiet in that way he had — not silence exactly, more like the cave exhaling him back into itself. The wolves were gone. The fire between us had burned down to something I’d need weeks to name.

Then: boots on stone. A satellite phone tone, obscene in the dark. Karim.

“Elena! Hello?! Is anyone here?”

I rose slowly, brushing sand from my skirt, aware of every muscle that ached. A Touareg came through first, his face its usual indigo patience, torch held low. Behind him Karim — and the look on his face when he saw me was the kind a man tries to arrange into relief but can’t quite manage. Something rawer underneath. Guilt, maybe. Or its close cousin.

“The desert does not like lost stories,” he said. “Luckily for you, the wind owes me a favour.”

He crossed the cave in four strides and stopped just short of touching me, taking in the state of me — sand in my hair, dust on my hands, whatever the cave had written on my face.

“Or perhaps the wind simply likes a good audience.” I gave him the dry smile he needed. “Thank you, gentlemen. I thought for a moment we’d have to start mining for new gods down here.”

“Your joke is more potent than your pulse, Elena.”

Behind me, I felt rather than heard Asdar shift.

“She is safe.” His voice came from somewhere near the rock art, already half-dissolved into shadow. “Tichii calls. You must take her. The wolf disappears now — until the next shadow needs him.”

Karim’s eyes moved to the space where Asdar stood, and I watched him decide not to ask. Wise man.

I turned to look. There was only the ripple of displaced air, a suggestion where a presence had been, and the painted animals on the wall behind it, ancient and indifferent.

Karim offered his arm. I waved it off — not unkindly.

“Careful. The wolf legend has strong adherence. I’d hate for it to catch you.”

“All legends begin with a woman and a beast,” he countered. “No shame in that.”

“Mm. And they usually end with considerable paperwork.”

Saleck made a sound that might have been a laugh. He led us up through the cave’s throat and out into air that tasted of approaching dawn — cold, thin, the Sahel holding its breath before colour returned to it. The Dhars rose black against a sky just beginning to consider grey.

Somewhere below, Tichii waited: whitewashed walls, closed courtyards, the kind of silence that means protection rather than absence.

Halfway down the slope, Karim pulled out the satellite phone. The sound of it connecting was the sound of one world reasserting itself over another.

“Tarmo. We have her. Shaken but whole.”

I kept walking, watching my feet on the rock. But I listened.

The pause on the other end was brief — the kind of brief that costs something to maintain.

Tarmo’s voice, when it came, was very level. That particular intensity I had learned to read correctly.

“The finest guesthouse in Tichii. Private. Trusted staff only, doctor on standby — and the Marabout. Yes.” A pause. “I don’t want brave. I want silent and secure.”

Karim: “We go after the men responsible. Saleck has trail already.”

Another silence. Then, quietly, the thing that made my chest do something inconvenient:

“She is not a victim. Treat her accordingly.”

The call ended. Karim pocketed the phone and glanced at me sidelong.

“You heard.”

“Enough.”

“He organised half of this from a hotel in Hargeisa, Somaliland. He hasn’t slept.”

I said nothing. Asdar’s warning moved through me again — you will shake men to their core — and I looked at the lightening horizon and felt the weight of the twins shift inside me, alive and entirely unimpressed by my night.

Saleck, ahead of us on the path, spoke without turning.

“Tichii closes her doors around those she protects. The doctor for your body. The Marabout for whatever the cave gave you that has no other name.” He paused. “After what you carry — nothing less.”

“You men,” I said, “take your wolves and your honour rather seriously.”

Men may be wolves. But my howl is loud.

“Seriousness keeps travellers alive here.” Karim’s voice was dry but not unkind. “Let us deliver you to the living, before the dead decide to make sport of you.”

Dawn broke as Tichii sharpened on the horizon — walls catching the first light, silent and absolute, the kind of place that had seen everything and chosen, long ago, to keep its counsel.

I walked toward it. Smudged, unbowed, carrying more than I’d arrived with.

The story, it seemed, had no intention of abandoning me either.

I.Ph.