The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)

Mother,” he said through gritted teeth.
    “And have it done properly.”
    “Yes, Mother,” Anubis repeated. “I know just the creatures for the job. They have never failed me.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
    STRAPPED INTO A flimsy wood and paper glider, Scathach flew past the window and waved.
    Within the rattling vimana, Joan of Arc waved back. “She’s enjoying herself,” she said.
    “What?” Saint-Germain asked. He had drawn a staff of five lines in his Moleskine notebook and was rapidly filling it with notes and rests, humming along as he wrote.
    “Scathach. I just saw her glide past the window. She looked like she was enjoying herself,” she said, shouting to be heard over the noise in the vimana.
    “Who is?” Saint-Germain clambered to his feet and peered through the window. He saw Scathach rise and cut right, wheeling down on an invisible wind current, just above the canopy of trees. “Well, that’s nice for her,” he said absently. “Now, just give me a sec, I want to get this melody down.” He slumped to the floor and bent his head back over the notebook.
    “I think she may be safer out there than she would be in here,” William Shakespeare muttered. He was sitting to the right of Prometheus, watching nervously as the big Elder struggled to control the ancient craft.
    Palamedes stood behind the Bard, and even his usually impassive face was creased with concern.
    “It was the last vimana available,” Prometheus explained. He pulled down on the throttle and it snapped off in his hand. He tossed the broken stick aside and gripped the end with his fingertips. “No one else wanted it.”
    “I can see why,” Will said.
    “You didn’t have to come,” the Elder snapped. “You did have a choice.”
    Will looked up at Palamedes and grinned. “We didn’t, really. It all ends today.”
    “Nothing will happen today,” Prometheus said confidently. “There’ll be a lot of shouting and banging on tables. It will take humankind days to get organized. Aten was the closest thing they had to a leader, and he’s gone now. They have no one to lead them.”
    Scathach leaned to the right and felt the glider shift beneath her. Then she banked left and right in a series of quick zigzags. She had never flown in a glider before, but she was an accomplished horsewoman and a world-class surfer. And gliding, she discovered, was just like surfing, except she was riding air instead of water.
    She’d learned to ride the waves in the bitterly cold waters that pounded her island fort of Skye millennia before surfing became a sport. Centuries later she’d even led a band of Maori warriors on a raid from one island to another to rescue some captured children. The lookouts had been watching for sails to signal the arrival of the enemy—the Maori had evaded them by surfing in on long boards.
    She whooped a war cry. She was loving this and had only one tiny regret—that she’d discovered it so late in life.
    Scathach the Shadow adjusted her weight, bringing the front end of the glider up, forcing air under the wings. The glider rose in slow spirals, and when she thought she was high enough in the sky, she swung around and looked down.
    Directly below her the forest spread out in a vast unbroken carpet of green. In the distance, shimmering on the horizon, were the blue of the sea and the gold of Danu Talis, with the great Pyramid of the Sun dominating the skyline.
    There were three thousand gliders in the air below her, and though they had been designed to carry only one person, most carried a second strapped precariously beneath the first. Paper and leather crackled as they flew, the sound like distant thunder.
    Almost forty vimana sped through the air below the gliders. Most had been scavenged and bolted together from bits of other craft. There were a few of the rare triangular shapes, a scattering of the big Rukma warships, but the vast majority were the small circular craft designed to hold two people but jammed with five and six warriors. None of the craft were new, and a couple—including the one carrying Joan and the others—were ancient, with glassless portholes, their metal shells held together by knotted vines, pocked with holes that had been patched with leaves and wood. All of the craft were dangerously overloaded. Before they’d taken flight, Huitzilopochtli had told Scathach he was committing the Yggdrasill’s entire defenses—almost ten thousand warriors—to the battle. Four thousand would