The Dragon Lantern Read Online Free Page A

for. Archie leaned out to look down the length of the thing, which hung in a great wide space in the heart of Cahokia in the Clouds. It was more than a hundred levels tall, and surrounded on all sides by a ring of apartments and hotels with expensive views.
    The Cahokia Man, as the statue was called, was made of rough, reddish-brown stone. It was a grotesque imitation of a human man, with two squat, powerful legs, four thick, burly arms, and a flat, wide head that looked like it had been pounded down into his shoulders with a sledgehammer the size of the Emartha Machine Man Building in New Rome. The Cahokia Man had been hung here by whatever ancients had created the giant balloon-kite that bore it aloft, trussed up and bound like a prisoner to its own helium ball and chain. For centuries people had gazed up at the Cahokia Man and his giant balloon and wondered who he was supposed to be, and what had possessed the ancients to hang him 20,000 feet in the air. But Archie knew who he was, and why he was there.
    The Cahokia Man was a Mangleborn.
    Archie knew because his parents knew. They were researchers for the Septemberist Society, and it was their job to learn everything they could about the Mangleborn. When the Mangleborn rose, it was the League of Seven who came together and put them down again—the league the Septemberists had been set up to support. But the Mangleborn couldn’t be killed. At least, no one had yet figured out how to kill one. Instead, they were trapped. Imprisoned. Usually underground, sometimes underwater.
    And, very rarely, in the sky.
    The Cahokia Man’s real name was Antaeus. Like all Mangleborn, it fed on lektricity, the energy source in lightning, the power the Septemberists worked to keep the world from rediscovering lest the Mangleborn rise again. But in the same way that the Mangleborn Malacar Ahasherat had a connection to the insect world, so too did the Mangleborn Antaeus have a connection to the Earth. As long as Antaeus touched the ground, it was unbeatable. The Roman League knocked it down, only to watch it get up again and again. At last, so the Septemberist legends went, the Roman League’s shadow and strongman, Heracles, held it off the ground while the League’s scientist, Daedalus, and their tinker, Wayland Smith, hooked it to the tethered balloon they had created to separate it from the Earth forever.
    Or at least as long as people left it alone.
    The story, of course, like most stories of the League and the Mangleborn they fought, had been rewritten over the centuries, in part because people forgot, and in part because people wanted to forget. Wanted to sweep the memory of the Mangleborn and their horrors under the rug of mythology. And so the League of Seven defeating Antaeus the earth elemental became Heracles defeating a wrestler on the way to one of his Twelve Labors, and a giant Mangleborn hanging in plain sight in the sky at the border of Illini and Pawnee territory became a tourist attraction.
    At the stop where they got off, a family of Wichita asked Archie to take their picture in front of it.
    Their lodge, located right across from one of the Cahokia Man’s lower armpits, was called the Cahokia Arms. Why Philomena Moffett had booked their rooms so close to one of the greatest monsters in the world, Archie couldn’t understand. It gave him the creeps. Maybe it was because Mrs. Moffett had never seen a living one the way Archie and Hachi and Fergus had, had never had a nightmare come to life in front of her. Just seeing a Mangleborn in his dreams had scared Archie so badly it had turned his hair completely white, and now for the last three nights he’d had to sleep with one right outside the window with a view they’d paid extra for.
    â€œWe would have been here a lot sooner if we’d used the gyrocopters,” Fergus said as they went inside.
    â€œWe would have been pancakes in Cahokia on the Plains if we’d used those