And the saga continues... sorry for the gap between updates. Work sucks. I think the ending's a little weak.

"I expected more gold," Tonks grumbled. Standing in the cramped entryway of the tomb of Djedset with the top of her presently fluorescent orange head just brushing the low ceiling, the young auror surveyed their destination with her hands on her hips ad a definite attitude of anticlimax. The entryway in which they stood led to a small, mostly bare antechamber. Steps led from the antechamber down into the tomb itself. Sand, mingled with the rubble, trash, and general debris of millennia, nearly filled the lower room, burying most of the tomb's contents and obscuring most of the artwork decorating the walls. The visible upper portions of the murals, their figures moving in a stilted, awkward way matched to their stylized postures, presented scenes disturbing enough that only Moody seemed able to look at them without shuddering.

The tip of Tonks's wand flared pale blue for a moment, and she nodded. "It's clear, though. Only had to neutralize a couple of minor jinxes, though there's some residue– think the Death Eaters already took care of the major wards?" She directed the question to Moody, who nodded tersely and shouldered his way past her, poking with his staff at the pile of detritus blocking their way before looking over his shoulder at Clara, eyebrows lifting in a pointed, if unspoken, question.

"It's... it's really an unexcavated tomb!" Clara spoke mostly to herself, her voice nearly trembling with enthusiasm. "This is the find of a lifetime. Especially if... well, if the, ah... wards... were still intact, that might mean it's been relatively undisturbed, although the amount of fill suggests a breach somewhere. The sand and the debris from outside washes in with floods, mostly. You get a fair bit of site contamination that way, but you can usually date the layers, which is often quite a find in itself, but it's going to take months of–"

Moody's impatient glower stopped her short.

"Merlin's boots, woman!" he scoffed. "We don't have months. At best we've got days. More likely hours, possibly minutes. The Death Eaters could be on us at any moment. Constant vigilance!"

Their interrogation of the captured Death Eater had revealed not only the location of the tomb, but the knowledge that Bellatrix Lestrange had apparated back to Voldemort, promising to bring back reinforcements. Clara tried not to wonder what Moody had done with the prisoner.

"I take it the Order isn't planning to sponsor a full-fledged dig in the name of archaeological progress and proper methodology?" she hazarded.

"I'd prefer to just destroy the place and everything in it, but we need to be sure we've rid ourselves of the Key, so we've got to find it first." Moody planted his staff on the ground, leaning on it slightly, and Clara suddenly saw the aching fatigue in his scarred features, the toll the battle and the stunning hex had taken on the aging but still formidable Auror. Even in his present state, he was not a man she would wish to pick a fight with even without the factor of magic; just the same, her heart went out to him, and she resolved privately not to put up too much of a fight about the principles of proper fieldwork. He deserved better.

"How do we go about that?" Tonks glanced from her mentor to their archaeological consultant, head canted slightly to the side in a questioning look. "We can't just accio the Key, can we? If Lestrange was telling the truth, and it might be a Portkey to the Land of the Dead, the last thing we want to do is grab hold of it."

Moody's mouth twitched in what might have been the start of an approving smile, and he reached out and gruffly patted Tonks on the shoulder. "Right, lass. Constant vigilance. You'll make an Auror yet." Tonks beamed, and Moody turned brusque again. "We don't want to miss anything else of interest, either. Doc?"

"I hate to break this to you both," Clara sighed, "but in order to get through all this fill without missing something important, or destroying something we might need, it really will take several weeks with a full excavation crew, and that's if we cut every corner in the book and I never expect to work in this business again, which I do. With just the three of us... we really are looking at months, Moody. Unless you've got some sort of excavation and sorting spell stashed away?"

"Detector charm on the whole pile to flag any magically-tainted artifacts. Tonks, start levitating out bits of this mess; try and drop it somewhere discreet. Doc, you grab anything glowing– that'll be the magical items– or anything else that looks likely. I'll keep the Detector charm up and watch our backs. And remember, constant vigilance!"

Moody flicked his wand toward the wall of sand and rubble before them, his good eye narrowed in concentration while the magical one trained itself firmly on the desert at their backs. Faint hints of blue light seeped out from the depths of the fill, and Clara was suddenly struck by the eeriness of it all, standing in a deserted tomb in the middle of the night while remnants of long-buried Dark magic glowed cold blue in the blackness. Her growing weariness– they had left the library in Cairo shortly after dinnertime, and her watch hovered near midnight now– only added to the sense of surrealism.

At her shoulder, Tonks murmured something that sounded like "mobilicorpus," and the upper layer of the debris and sand lifted into the air, a trail of sand trickling out into the night like a strange wisp of fog with bricks, animal bones, and sundry other items snared in its midst.

The night passed in a blur of almost frenzied work fraught with constant tension. All three of them expected the Death Eaters to return in force at any moment, and even with Mad-Eye standing lookout, Clara caught herself jumping at the faintest rustle of the wind. The upper layers contained mostly sand, and Clara watched it drift by, reaching up to pluck out the few items marked by the faint blue glow of Moody's strenuously maintained Detector Charm and anything else that looked interesting; in a fit of self-indulgence, she chose not to limit her definition of "interesting" solely to "relevant." As the night wore on, her eyes ached with the strain, and she swayed on her feet from drowsiness exacerbated by the tedium, but she held back her protests when she saw the haggard looks of Tonks and Mad-Eye, struggling to keep watch while maintaining their respective spells.

It felt like excavation by assembly line. The archaeologist in her– and that was nearly all there was in her, in truth; after the utter collapse of her personal life all those years ago, she had clung tighter to her work and come to define herself by it– cringed at the lack of documentation, at the lack of attention to context, at the destruction, but she worked doggedly on, knowing that the forms of scholarly fieldwork would matter only in a world in which Voldemort did not lurk in the night with an army of the dead and the gods knew what else. This was not, could not be, an excavation; it was a frantic search for a weapon that must be either used or destroyed.

They went on like that until the sun– Horus in all his fiery glory, Clara thought blearily, almost giddily– had risen fully above the desolate horizon and its heat began to scorch the air of the valley floor, and Mad-Eye called a halt.

"We'll rest during the day," he explained. "It'll waste time we don't have, but better that than risk some stray Muggle or worse seeing our work, and we're all exhausted anyway. If we wear ourselves out, we'll have no strength to fight when the time comes, and it will." He sounded, and they all felt, surprised that the fight had not already come during the interminable night of uneasy waiting. "We'll take turns at watch. The other two'd better sleep. Doc, I know we're asking a bit much of you, but we'll need what you've got already packed up and labelled." Clara nodded. They hadn't recovered much from the upper layers of the tomb, only two or three small items that Moody declared to be of minor significance and a handful of other things she had insisted on recovering less for their mission than for their archaeological value, including the pieces of a shattered clay vessel and half a broken Bedouin amulet that must have washed in fairly recently.

Mad-Eye took the first watch, while Clara and Tonks dozed in the shade of the tomb's entryway. Despite the exhaustion weighing on her and blurring the edges of her thoughts, Clara slept only fitfully, and finally abandoned the pretense altogether. She carefully wrapped and labeled the magical artifacts, then placed them in the crate Tonks had unfolded from her pocket and placed in the entryway; she tried very hard not to think about mundane things like Conservation of Mass while she did this. Finished with her work for the moment, she leaned against the relatively cool stone and set about fitting together the pieces of the little clay jar, ornately carved with a veritable jungle of plants. The work occupied her so thoroughly, and her senses were so dulled by exhaustion, that she never heard the footsteps behind her.

"Reparo," Moody intentioned, and the jar's pieces sealed themselves together in her hands as Clara jumped, almost choking on a hastily-stifled gasp. "Constant vigilance," Moody chided gruffly, and she nodded, looking suitably chagrined, and looked down at the jar in her hands, newly intact.

"Do you have any idea how much I wish I could do that sort of thing?" she inquired, looking up at the Auror.

"You've got your own uses, lass. We wouldn't have known where to look for the tomb without you," Moody pointed out. "It would've taken–"

He fell silent, holding up a hand to forestall her questions, and drew his wand in a motion so fast that Clara never saw his hand drop. "Tonks!" he hissed, and the pink-haired Auror struggled awake, on her feet with her wand at the ready. After a moment, she joined Clara in looking questioningly at Mad-Eye.

"I thought I saw something move, just over that ridge," he explained. The group watched tensely for a few moments, but saw nothing more, and Moody left Clara on lookout while he moved off to strengthen the perimeter wards.

"I'm surprised they haven't tried something by now," Tonks commented when he returned. "How long can it take Bellatrix—damn her—to bring back reinforcements?"

Moody nodded, settling himself on one of the outer steps with a weary sigh. "They're up to something, I'd wager."

"Aren't they always?" Tonks quipped, and Moody nodded.

So it went, the days and nights stretching slowly into a week that slowly stretched into two; they worked by night, and by day they slept and alternated watches while Clara puzzled over the paintings and hieroglyphs on the walls or catalogued what they had found. The tomb paintings never stopped troubling her; like all wizarding paintings, they moved of their own accord, like animations in bas-relief, and acted out the horrible scenes described in the accompanying hieroglyphs. The hieroglyphs, despite their pictographic origins, stayed mercifully still.

Throughout the long days of work and waiting, they expected a Death Eater attack at any moment, but none came, and the tension grew with each passing hour. Several times Mad-Eye thought he heard something just outside their perimeter, and Tonks's morning and evening checks on their wards revealed the presence of an unknown something, but no overt threat showed itself, and the trio worked on in a state of uneasy watchfulness.

At last, toward the close of a night's work, the removal of a pile of sand much like any other revealed an object surrounded by a blue light so brilliantly intense that Clara could not even discern the shape of the item in the center of the glow. "Moody! Tonks!" she called, "I think we've found it!"

She reached out to grab it, but Moody swatted her hand aside. "Don't touch it, Doc! It's a Portkey, remember?" He waved his wand at it, and it settled into the specially charmed box they had prepared for it. "We'll have to des—" A gesture from Tonks cut him off, and he turned and limped with remarkable speed to the entryway.

The first spell, fired in haste by a short Death Eater in the rear of the advancing group, over the startled heads of his comrades, bounced harmlessly off the limestone cliff face, leaving a reddish char on the rock. Shoving Clara behind them, Tonks took up position on one side of the tomb's entrance, using the lip of the doorway as cover, and Mad-Eye did likewise on the opposite side. Peering out around the bulk of Moody's shoulder, Clara counted somewhere between five and a dozen robed, masked figures, their exact number concealed by the shimmering heat and the swirling column of sand that surrounded them as they advanced. They resembled a horrifying mirage, and only the harsh cackle of Bellatrix Lestrange's laugh and the relentless tramp of boots on the rock confirmed their reality, with a sudden sickening plummet of Clara's stomach.

"What took them so long?" Tonks asked Mad-Eye calmly, a note of bemused impatience in her voice. "I figured Bellatrix would be quicker about getting the reinforcements."

Moody shrugged, and Clara noticed that he had returned his wand to his cloak pocket in favor of the ever-present staff, which seemed to function as more than a mere walking stick. Tonks would later explain to her that Mad-Eye preferred the staff, specially crafted by Ollivander himself in gratitude for service during the war, for heavier work– and six-to-one odds counted as heavy work.

"I should've known," he growled, "They were waiting for us to find the Key before they moved in to take it. No sense in not letting us do all the work."

A jet of greenish light pierced the veil of dust and splayed in a shower of sparks against Mad-Eye's quickly cast Shield Charm. As the shield faded, Tonks leveled her wand at the base of the whirlwind that concealed and sheltered the advancing enemy, muttering something Clara could not make out over the sound of footsteps and the roar of the spell-driven wind, and the swirling wall of sand faltered for a moment. The gap was enough; Moody lifted his staff and brought it down again with a resounding thump, and its carved head blazed electric blue for an instant before a wave of light swept the leading edge of the Death Eaters, two men and a woman, off their feet and backwards into their comrades. Those behind them stumbled, but recovered enough to cast, and Clara felt the cold tingle of a killing curse miss her ear by millimeters as the three robed figures in the rear returned fire, using their struggling companions as cover while the remaining six fanned out, three to a side, in the hopes of flanking the cornered defenders.

Retreating a short way into the antechamber and dropping to a crouch, Clara tried to block out the sounds of battle as she glanced around frantically for something she might bring to bear as a weapon. Behind her, she heard Tonks cry out in pain and fury as a hex, dodged too slowly, caught her arm. Clara turned briefly to see the stricken limb hanging limp and boneless at the Auror's side, but she switched wand hands and kept up the fight. Moody's staff flared gold, and the cluster of Death Eaters approaching on the right crumpled, unconscious. She saw snatches of the fight– Mad-Eye's feral grin, barely human on his scarred features; the impassive but menacing whiteness of the Death Eaters' masks advancing implacably; bodies crumpled on the sand; the blazing light of spells and sunlight. Tearing her eyes back to the antechamber, she moved toward the corner she remembered, and shouted in triumph as she found what she sought.

Hurrying back to the entryway, she shoved the object into Moody's free hand, then ducked behind him as he hurled a curse at their attackers. "Moody! Use this!" His natural eye flickered downward at the hieroglyph-inscribed bronze jackal in his hand and then lifted to Clara, brow lifting in an impatiently questioning look while the magical eye remained focused with chilling intensity on the battle.

"Use it for what? Speak up, lass!"

"Read the inscription aloud, then… ah… I don't know, perhaps you should throw it or something, but the inscription says—" Her words were cut off by a spell whizzing above her head, and Moody shoved her further back into the cover of the doorway. "It says something to the effect of that you can use this thing to call on the jackal, the servant of Anubis, to drive intruders away from the tomb, but you've got to read the inscription!"

He turned away for a moment, waving his staff to send a spray of sparks at the nearest Death Eaters, who returned a hail of curses and hexes. The two Aurors ducked behind the doorway, and the spells spattered against the limestone. "I can't read Egyptian, Doc!"

"Then just repeat it after me!"

Tonks stopped attacking and threw all her efforts into maintain a Shield Charm as Clara and Mad-Eye laboriously recited the inscribed words, stumbling here and there. As the little bronze figurine began to tremble in his grasp, Moody hurled it into the midst of the oncoming Death Eaters.

The defenders fell back into the cover of the tomb's entryway, watching as the sleek black shape of a jackal seemed to emerge from the sand. Two more, slightly smaller than the first, leaped out of the hot desert air. A few of the Death Eaters turned away from the tomb to deal with this new threat, but they were too late. The jackals set upon them, black-furred, fanged death unleashed in their midst, and within moments two robed figures lay still and silent on the rocky ground, and the others had fled, either running into the desert in a blind panic or Apparating back the way they had come. The three jackals paused, three sets of golden eyes solemnly regarding the pair of Aurors and the archaeologist huddled in the doorway of the tomb, and then they shimmered, miragelike, and faded into the air.

Moody and Tonks exchanged glances, then Tonks turned and practically tackled Clara in an exuberant hug. "Nice going, Doc!"

Clara smiled faintly. "It's what you hired me for."

There was a brief silence while the three caught their breath and Moody surveyed the scene to be sure the Death Eaters and the jackals had really gone, and at last Clara asked, hesitantly, "What about the Key?"

"I think," Tonks began, "that some doors are best left unopened. Nothing good can come of using that thing."

"My thoughts exactly," Moody said with a curt nod. "I'll see to destroying it while you two pack up. Then we can all go home."

AN: That concludes the Egyptian expedition-- this one, anyway.

Next Time: Clara returns to academia, and Snape holds a grudge.