Making mummies is an ancient and grisly business, but business was good once again. The bodies lay on low stone tables beneath the timeless sands of Egypt, lit only by flickering torchlight.

Half a dozen acolytes in ancient dress gathered their implements nervously, the jewels and glass beads of their thick collar necklaces glinting, and the light linen of their shendyt kilts shining a pure, audacious white. They began with the body on the highest platform. For while all men may be created equal, all mummies are not. This body was taller than the others, and broader in the shoulders, with skin the color of wet sand, a hawklike nose, and sharp features that seemed determined even in death.

The acolytes dipped their cloths in a bucket of cool well water, wrung them out, and got to work washing the corpse.

Their hands trembled slightly as they put down their rags and picked up their blades. They were nervous as they made the first cuts: Everything had to go perfectly. The blood was drained from the man’s body and taken out in buckets. Once that was done, the internal organs were removed, one by one. Only the steadiest hands made these cuts. The others busied themselves packing the carefully culled pieces into sacred canopic jars for the trip to the afterlife. Only the man’s heart was left in his body: the most vital organ, the home of the soul.

The clay lid clinked into place on the last of the jars.

The workers washed their hands in the water buckets and then rubbed the body with natron salt to preserve and dry it. They packed the hollowed-out frame with still more natron and plugged the skull with linen.

By now, the acolytes’ foreheads and bare chests glowed with sweat. They anointed and sealed the body with a thick, sticky resin. They lifted its shoulders from the stone — the broad torso not nearly so heavy now, filled only with salt — and wrapped it in strips of fresh linen.

Finally, they placed a heavy mask on the man’s head, transforming his own sharp features into those of an Egyptian vulture. Solid gold, except for the sharp, iron point of the cunning predator’s beak.

The acolytes repeated their grim work with methodical care, and one by one, the bodies were transformed. As they neared completion on the fifth, blood-spattered and exhausted, a chorus of voices rose in the chamber behind them. Beneath the largest of the torches, a group of three men, priests of The Order, chanted words not heard for millennia. They were reading from the Lost Spells of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, legendary incantations of unimaginable power.

The priests released their final lines with full-throated fervor, then stood winded and wide-eyed in the sudden silence, in thrall to the unearthly power they’d felt surging through them.

The priests watched intently. The acolytes barely dared to blink.

Had it worked?

Had the ancient Spells accomplished their dark task?

These were no idle questions. Far more than a day’s work was at stake here. The figures on these slabs had bet their lives on it. They had died for this.

But they had no intention of staying dead for long. Nor did they intend to remain in these frail human forms. There were other forms waiting for them in the afterlife — if they could get there.