The Mummy: The Sealed Cartouche
A hydrogeologist who taught himself dead priest-scripts for fun wakes in a 1922 survey tent on the Saqqara plateau, sharing a Brooklyn combat-engineer's body and an Arabic phrase still glowing under his eyelids. The Cartouche he carries is not magic but liturgy as engineering — a body made portable temple, hands that forge contracts in linen and resin, a tongue that weighs a man's heart and turns his true name into a leash. Every binding deepens a debt with Anubis that the god will one day come to collect in person. He knows the films, not the reality, and the reality includes a British undersecretary running a Set-cult, a high priest he gambles on binding rather than killing, and a Medjai chieftain's passed-over daughter who chooses to give him her name anyway. Then a man in a cheap suit sets a canopic jar on his desk and says he has been waiting one hundred forty-seven years.