Magonia(34)

The chart looks like something I’d drool over at a museum—yellowed, decaying at the edges. Half star map, half monsters in the water. In one corner, I glimpse a giant mouth with pointed teeth rising up out of the sky, and in another, a city in the clouds.
I angle my eyeballs to get a better look, but I hear Dai behind me.
“Ordinary Skyman Ray,” he says. “You take orders from me, not the captain.”
Zal looks up at me, and nods. “You’re assigned to the first mate.”
Salute her, shrieks Milekt. I salute as best I can.
Zal smiles slightly. “Daughter, you’re doing that with the wrong hand.”
I’m medium-embarrassed, but it’s not as though I grew up on a ship. I have a history of hosp—
“Where’s that?” I say, pointing at the chart. There’s a cluster of buildings. All around the city, there are whirling lines. “Are there cities here? What are those?” I point at the lines.
“That’s Maganwetar, our capital, and those are its defenses. The capital is surrounded by winds.”
The name of the city cues a memory in me. Old High German? That’s what it is. Maganwetar—the word for whirlwind.
Jason. I wince.
“Aboard Amina Pennarum, we prefer the open sky to cities,” Zal says. “The residents of Maganwetar live in buildings tethered to one another, their whirlwinds and tempestarii keeping everything but provisions out. It’s a city of sleepers and storm magicians, but the residents of Maganwetar are lazy as drowners.”
“Drowners like me?” I ask.
“No. You, Aza, were never a drowner,” says Zal. “We are in the skies to defend Magonia, even if there are those in Maganwetar who think they need no defenses, no strategies, no battle plan.”
Her lip curls.
“Things are changing, Aza Ray, and you’re part of the change. Now, I expect you to learn your duties.”
Dai tugs me away to another part of the deck.
I’m exploding with questions.
“Are we going to Maganwetar?” I ask. “Where is it?”
Dai looks grudging. “It moves. And we’re not going there. You’re not welcome in the capital, nor are you safe.”
“What do you mean, not safe?”
“You’re not an official crew member of Amina Pennarum,” says Dai, hesitating only a moment.
“How am I not official? Didn’t the captain send someone to get me? A Breath—”
Dai jerks, looking around. “Don’t mention them,” he says. He holds my eyes, deadly serious. “Trust me. They’re nothing you want to call to this ship, not without a good reason, and not without funds to hire them.”
“But what are they?”
He doesn’t answer. “You were reason enough for the captain to summon one, but I cannot think of another. If we come into proximity with an official ship, you are to disappear into the holds below and the rest of us are to deny that you’re here. These are the captain’s orders.”
I glance toward Zal, who isn’t looking at us. I watch her take the wheel, this giant thing, big spokes and handles around it, which I’m only really noticing now. It’s made in the shape of the sun, so the handles are the rays, and the ship is steered by rotating.
“But where are we going?” I ask again.
“Your duty is to watch, not talk,” Dai says, sneering a little.
For a moment, I’m not sure exactly what I am supposed to be looking at. Then one of the Magonians sings with his canwr, and operates the crane by crooning into its gears.
Another Magonian’s song lights a fire in a little bowl, and makes a meal of toasted grain. He shares it with his bird.
Let me out, howls Milekt from inside my chest. I feel his grumpy fluttering and battering around in my lung. I’m a canwr, not an ordinary. I’m not meant for this. I’m for singing, not standing around, mute.
I have no time for this complaining bird, but I wouldn’t mind lighting fires with my voice.
“Do I have to let him out?” I ask Dai, and Dai smirks.
“No. Though you might want to. He’ll scratch.”
And he does, his little-bird toes climbing inside my lung.
The thought makes me queasy, but I swallow the rising bile down. “How can there be cities in the sky?” I ask Dai, trying to distract myself from the scrabbles of Milekt. “What do they float on?”
Dai sighs.
“Do you know everything about the undersky, then? Why their heavens are blue, and how their rooms are lit in the dark? Do drowners know how their airplanes move through the sky? Can you tell me how they fly?”
I’m both sucked in and harrumphed by Dai’s simple questions. Yeah, I DO know those things. Maybe we have things to tell each other. I feel a duel coming on.
I’ll tell you how airplanes fly if you’ll show me what you know about this place.
I’m just opening my mouth to tell him so when he snorts and laughs at me.

“I could talk for a hundred years, Aza Ray Quel, and not tell you everything about Magonia. There was a time when we and the drowners consorted. Then even the worst of our cities, the ones where now everyone starves, were seen as heavens by the people below. And we were angels or, sometimes, gods.”
He pauses. “Have you ever swabbed a deck before?”
“There really weren’t a lot of boats around my house, since you know, no ocean. And, I was sick. So, swabbing . . . um, no.”
Dai holds out a mop and a bucket. I’m about to take them when he lets out a note, and I can hear the bird inside him join the song.
The mop levitates, then whips around, so that it actually scrubs the deck.