darts, and terrible fire, and shocking bolts of exploding
lightning.
Camicazi and Snotlout fired arrows at the
swooping horrors as they clung desperately to the tilting
island of ice, bucking and speeding madly down the
river like an out of control sleigh ride. Inexplicably,
Hurricane, the riding-dragon, was still fast asleep.
The roar of the waterfall downstream got louder
and louder, growing into a great watery din of noise,
and even in the night air they could see a billowing mist
of spray swelling up above the forest ahead, like clouds
from a smoking volcano.
The waterfall was very close now. One more bend
and they would be rocketing over the edge.
Hiccup and Fishlegs caused chaos and confusion
by shooting at the attacking dragons from the back of
the all-but-invisible Deadly Shadow. But the dragons
were attacking in such nightmare numbers that it would
be mere minutes before they overwhelmed the raft.
NE-OOOOW! Another Razorwing leapt from the
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rocky riverbank, and landed with an evil vulture grin
and a scrape of razored wings on the other end of the
ice-island, tipping it downwards so violently that it was
practically submerged.
‘This plan’s going really wrong…’ whispered
Camicazi as the Razorwing prepared to leap and slice
and— BAM!
The bucking, jostling island of ice slammed into a
rock and shattered into pieces…
catapulting Camicazi, Snotlout, the Razorwing and the
Hurricane into the numbing cold of the river.
The freezing shock of the water woke the
Hurricane at last. With a screech of alarm the poor
creature started swimming, trying to disentangle its wet
wings in the chaos of the raging rapids.
Snotlout was still attached to
Hurricane by a long chain, and
so he was dragged behind the
panicking riding-dragon,
buffeted over and over, and
half-drowned by the water.
Like an untidy
scarecrow, Fishlegs
valiantly jumped from the
Deadly Shadow on to
Windwalker’s back so
that he could
help try and catch Camicazi. Hiccup urged the
Deadly Shadow on, and Fishlegs flew Windwalker
down through the hail of Razorwing darts towards the
blonde head of Camicazi bobbing in the river.
‘DOWN, SHADOW! DOWN!’ Hiccup shouted.
The triple-headed Deadly Shadow swooped…
… and missed, as a manic surge of water swept
Camicazi out of the dragon’s reaching talons.
ROOOOOOOARRR!
The sound of thousands and thousands of
tons of gushing river water tumbling into a
waterfall was absolutely terrifying, and it was
just below them now.
The river rushed over the edge in a
flooding, crashing tumult.
Just the second before she was
swept over, Camicazi got one little
monkey hand around the rope
dangling from the Deadly
Shadow above and was lifted
clear of the deluge.
But the Hurricane
went plunging
over, plummeting
downwards, and
Snotlout and Hurricane would have crashed
to their deaths on the rocks below if the
Hurricane had not dragged its wings out of
the water in the nick of time. Screaming, the
Hurricane soared upwards, yanking Snotlout
with him.
Fishlegs steered Windwalker beneath
the dangling Camicazi, and she dropped on
to Windwalker’s back in mid-air. He then flew
Windwalker alongside the Hurricane, and
Camicazi jumped across on to the Hurricane’s
back so that she could heave the dangling
Snotlout up on the chains and into the saddle.
The three dragons now wheeled about,
and the Deadly Shadow shot back upriver
towards the hideout
in the mountains,
closely followed by
Windwalker, and
the terrified snorting
Hurricane, and a pack of
howling, murderous Dragon
Rebellion dragons, driven
mad by the arrow attack and
sensing a meal on the horizon.
They didn’t have long to get back to safety.
And now Hiccup heard a sound that really chilled
his blood.
This was far worse than a mere waterfall. It was a
distant, screaming, baying bawl, the inevitable result of
the awful chant of the Red-Rage.
It was the roar of the Dragon Furious.
One of the Dragon Rebellion dragons must have
flown up to his stronghold in the north, and awoken
him. Even at this distance Hiccup could just make out
the words:
‘HE MUST NEVER GROW UP! I WILL
HUNT HIM DOWN! I WILL SWOOP FROM
THE HEAVENS AND OBLITERATE HIM!’
By ‘him’ the Dragon Furious was referring to
Hiccup.
Far away to the north, out of that ice and that
fire, those volcanic bubbling pools, there rose a dark
shape so unimaginably large that it blotted out the
moon. Each beat of its immense dark wings took it
across a vast extent of territory at astonishing speed
as it headed south, straight towards them in the
Murderous Mountains, its eyeballs leaking fire, and
its great mouth screaming murder and butchery and
everything awful.
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‘We need to make it back to the hideout, now!’
Hiccup yelled hysterically.
There were so many dragons of the Dragon
Rebellion that they looked like a mass of
thunderclouds, or a plague of locusts, thousands
and thousands and thousands strong.
They were flying so close to one another
that every now and then the Razorwings
accidentally sliced the head off any
dragons flying next to them, and scaly
heads dropped randomly into the
gorge, still screaming and
shooting fire or lightning or
poison arrows.
Hiccup let the Deadly Shadow steer while he
lay backwards on his tummy like a rear-gunner, firing
arrows continuously at the pursuing Dragon Rebellion,
trying to make sure he didn’t accidentally hit Fishlegs
on Windwalker, or Snotlout and Camicazi on the
Hurricane.
The flying conditions were extraordinarily
difficult: the shifting fog, the zig-zagging, twisting
gorge, and spindly needle-like rock-formations looming
up unexpectedly out of the mist. It was a little like
shooting rapids in the air.
Luckily Windwalker, the Deadly Shadow and
the Hurricane were some of the fastest riding-dragons
in the Barbaric World – only a Silver Phantom flies
faster – so they just about kept ahead of the screaming,
spitting, howling horror of the Dragon Rebellion in
pursuit. Hiccup tried not to listen to the deeper, darker
threat in the background, the great winged shape of
the Dragon Furious, whose ferocious bellow was even
louder than the Red-Rage. Furious sailed nearer and
nearer, like a great hunting owl of the night-time,
swooping down on some little mice who have
incautiously left their mousehole for a second.
‘I WILL TEAR THE WORLD APART IN
THE HUNT FOR HIM! I WILL KILL
HIM MYSELF!’
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Windwalker and the Deadly
Shadow rounded a corner and with
passionate relief, Hiccup saw a
gigantic spur of rock looming out of
the fog, right in front of them.
High up on a pointed pinnacle,
with a breathtaking view over the entire
surrounding landscape, there was a tree
balanced so precariously on a cliff-top
that it was almost in the act of falling
off. And beneath the tangled roots of this
tree, there was the underground treehouse
camp so secret, and so well hidden, there
were barely half a dozen beings alive in the
world that were aware of its existence.
Alvin the Treacherous would have
given his very best hook to know where that
underground treehouse was. The Dragon
Furious, too, had his dragons hunting high and
low for it, day and night.
It had once been the underground hideout
that Fishlegs’s mother, Termagant, had made long
ago when she was a little girl growing up in the
Murderous Mountains. The Deadly Shadow, who
had previously been Termagant’s dragon, had shown
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it to them, and Hiccup and his friends had
been hiding there waiting to meet up with
the Dragonmarkers on Doomsday Eve.
Hiccup had never been so glad to
see the hideout.
He hauled on the reins and
brought the Deadly Shadow to a
sudden, plunging halt in the air.
‘Take the others to the
underground treehouse and I’ll hold
up the Dragon Rebellion!’ Hiccup
shouted to Fishlegs as he rocketed past on the back
of the Windwalker. Thor knows how much Fishlegs
heard at the speed he was going.
The Hurricane zoomed after Fishlegs on
Windwalker in a maddened stream of terror. Hiccup
braced himself. He had six arrows lined up on the
Deadly Shadow’s back, and he fixed one to his bow
with trembling fingers. Hiccup had the advantage of
the Deadly Shadow’s invisibility, so that the Dragon
Rebellion dragons would not know where his arrows
were coming from.
Timing was everything.
The first Dragon Rebellion dragons plunged
around the corner, and Hiccup let fly one, two, three,
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four, five, six arrows.
With a shriek of shock, the first dragon, a
Razorwing, was hit. It went spiralling into the pack
behind, and then plummeted down into the gorge.
There was a brief, squalling moment of confusion.
But it was enough. By the time the pack had righted
themselves and recovered their concentration, their
prey had disappeared.
Windwalker, the Hurricane and their riders
had vanished down the entrance to the underground
treehouse, and the Dragon Rebellion, drooling and
enraged, could not see Hiccup hovering only twenty
feet away from them on the back of the Deadly
Shadow, which had reared up to conceal its rider. The
Razorwings swam in the air, barking at each other, and
eventually set off further down the gorge, where they
supposed the prey must have gone.
Hiccup breathed again.
And then it happened.
4. TWO RED EYES,
SUSPENDED IN THE AIR
There were two red eyes, suspended in the air, right in
front of where the Deadly Shadow was hovering.
Red eyes, narrowed to slits, with the pupils
slightly shivering.
Hiccup blinked, his brain unable to comprehend
the sight of two red eyes floating before him.
In the heat of the Dragon Rebellion chase he had
forgotten that the humans – Alvin the Treacherous and
his mother, Excellinor the witch – were also looking for
Hiccup, and the witch was using Vampire Spydragons
to hunt and spy for her.
Hiccup had never seen a Vampire Spydragon before,
but he knew they were chameleons that could turn
every part of themselves invisible – apart from their
glowing red eyes.
Slowly the rest of the Vampire Spydragon
materialised around those two red eyes hovering in
front of Hiccup.
It was a ghastly shrieking creature, with the head
of a vampire bat and the body of an enormous monkey.
For one second Hiccup saw this vision, and then
there was a searing pain in his left arm. He looked
down in confusion, as if it were happening to someone
else, to see the head of the Vampire Spydragon
attached to his arm.
The creature did not have time to latch on
properly with its clamping jaws before the Deadly
Shadow turned its head and tore the Vampire
Spydragon off Hiccup, throwing the bloodsucker into
the air like a dog tearing a rat off its back.
One second the screaming monster was visible
– the next it faded into invisibility again, red eyes
descending into the gorge.
Before Hiccup could move, or think, the flames
of the Dragon Furious reached the forest.
‘I WILL HUNT HIM DOOOOOOOWNNN!’
A great horizontal wall of fire blasted across
the night sky with such white-hot heat that it sheared
off the top of the mountain behind the underground
treehouse. The entire summit, tons and tons of rock
and boulders, plummeted into the gorge below.
The three mouths of the Deadly Shadow
screamed simultaneously as the fire poured on and
on over their heads, and in a few swift flaps it shot
through the ivy-draped entrance to the underground
treehouse.
Just in time.
‘He’s been hit… he’s been hit…’ Hiccup
heard a shaking Fishlegs say as he helped
Hiccup down from the Deadly Shadow's
back, and because Hiccup was nearly
fainting it sounded like Fishlegs
was talking from a long
distance away.
Outside,
the Dragon Furious, full
of vengeful hope, finally
reached the place where the
boy had last been seen. But his prey
had disappeared, and Furious had been
robbed of his victory once again.
The Dragon Furious exploded in an
Armageddon of anger, and as the Dragon
Rebellion’s fires of rage torched the battered
remains of the landscape below, a trembling
Toothless, Stormfly and Hogfly flattened
themselves against the walls of the hideout around
the entrance. Wodensfang popped his little ancient
head above the hole to peer out, and swiftly ducked
down again.
‘He won’t find us in here,’ wheezed
/>
Wodensfang, trying to reassure himself as much as
anyone else. ‘He won’t find us… He’s hunted us
before and he won’t find us now…’
But it was difficult to stay calm as the Red-Rage
Rebellion struck, relentlessly terrible and unremitting.
They could hear the burning and the crackling and the
shrieking as the forest went up in flames again, and
the wood shrivelled up like paper, and the little forest
creatures screamed as they fled the inferno.
‘Camicazi…’ panted Hiccup. ‘Where is
Camicazi?’
‘Hang on, Hiccup, you’re wounded…’ Fishlegs
was winding something around Hiccup’s arm. ‘Hang
on…’
But Hiccup ignored him and staggered into the
underground treehouse’s second room. Camicazi was
not there.
Hiccup limped back through the rooms again
and tried to climb the ladder up to the hole of the
entrance, only to be blown back, almost like he had
been punched in the face by a fist of heat. The wall of
flame was so burning hot that it seared the skin, even a
few feet into the room.
The Wodensfang shook his head gently.
‘You can’t go out there, Hiccup, not at the
moment…’
‘But we have to go after her!’ panted Hiccup.
‘Not now, Hiccup…’
‘Where has she gone?’ asked Fishlegs with round,
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solemn, horrified eyes.
‘She was taken,’ said a voice from behind them.
There on the floor, still attached to the Hurricane
by a long chain, lay Snotlout, his face hidden in
shadow. He repeated the same words, in the same
dead flat voice. ‘She was taken.’
‘What do you mean, “taken”?’ asked Fishlegs.
Hiccup already knew what Snotlout was going
to say.
A horrible lightning image of the Vampire
Spydragon with the red eyes flashed into Hiccup’s
mind. It seemed to be laughing
at him.
If there was one
Vampire Spydragon in
that gorge, maybe there
were more…
How To Train Your Dragon: How to Betray a Dragon's Hero Page 4