of a city. Looking up, in between the wooden boards,
Hiccup could see the shoes of people walking up and
down the walkways above. A hatch opened ahead of
them, and the Windwalker swerved just in time, for
someone chucked a bucket of fish guts through the
hatch before slamming it shut again.
Below them in the water were the rotting
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carcasses of sunken ships. Snotlout landed the
Hurricane on the upturned hull of one of these
submerged wrecks and gestured upwards with his
thumb.
‘This is the hatch,’ he whispered. ‘Before the
witch caught us, the Hurricane and I went on loads of
spying operations searching for the Things. Look, I’ve
marked the hatch with an X, to be sure I’d get the right
one when I came back.’
Hiccup and Fishlegs landed their dragons beside
him, and the three dragons sat in a row on the hull of
the sunken ship, like three great cormorants roosting
on a rock.
‘And who is in there guarding them?’
Snotlout’s eyes gleamed.
‘Oh, a couple of dozy Alvinsmen guards. But we
can deal with them, can’t we?’
‘He lies…’ whispered Stormfly in Dragonese.
‘Trust a liar to know a liar…’
‘If all three of us climb up,’ said Snotlout, ‘we can
carry the Throne through the hatch and balance it on
the back of the Deadly Shadow. And then we’ll go on
to the prison and rescue Camicazi.’
Hiccup drew his sword, and swallowed hard.
‘OK,’ said Hiccup. ‘Wodensfang, Hogfly and
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Stormfly, you stay here with Windwalker and the
Deadly Shadow.’
‘Woof, woof!’ said Hogfly obediently. ‘Keep to
the left! Marry me, sunshine! Where’s the exit?’
‘Toothless,’ said Hiccup, ‘you can come with me,
I don’t want to let you out of my sight…’
‘Because T-t-toothless is the Best Lost Thing?’
Toothless smiled radiantly. ‘See Stormfly… See
W-w-wodensfang… See very very stupid dragon
who looks like a pig… Toothless so important Hiccup
can’t let him out of his sight… Toothless V-V-VERY
VERY important…’
‘The Deadly Shadow can give all three of us a
lift up to the hatch. Windwalker, could you open it
for us please?’
A single breath from Windwalker incinerated the
bolts around the hatch, and it fell open.
Hiccup, sitting on the back of the Deadly Shadow
who was hovering just underneath the hatch, peered up
inside. It was completely dark, and completely quiet.
‘I’ll go in first,’ whispered Snotlout, ‘because I
know my way around…’
Snotlout’s eyes were curiously bright.
Was it excitement?
Or was it something more than that?
Snotlout laughed at Hiccup’s expression, which
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was a little dubious. ‘You do trust me, don’t you,
Hiccup?’
‘T-t-toothless doesn’t trust him…’ said Toothless’s
deep little voice from down in Hiccup’s waistcoat. ‘Is
like trusting a s-s-snake not to bite you…’
‘I want to trust you,’ said Hiccup steadily. ‘I really
really want to trust you, Snotlout…’
Snotlout dropped his own gaze. Did he look
guilty, just for a fraction of a second?
Then he drew his dagger, and put it between his
teeth.
Snotlout stood up on the Deadly Shadow’s
back and hauled himself on to the ledge of the hatch,
where he swung for a moment before climbing into the
darkness above and disappearing.
‘Is m-m-madness,’ said the muffled voice of
Toothless.
It was madness.
Snotlout hadn’t really given Hiccup cause to trust
him in the past.
But barely had Snotlout’s feet disappeared
through the hatch and into the room, than Hiccup
scrambled up after him.
Hiccup swallowed hard, and got to his feet, and
tried to make out where Snotlout was.
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‘Snotlout?’ he whispered nervously.
There was no answer.
The darkness was so absolute it muffled the
senses. Hiccup’s eyes peered desperately into the
blackness, but he could see nothing.
‘Snotlout?’ he whispered again, a little louder, but
again there was no reply; just a faint rustling.
Why was Snotlout being so silent? He must be in
the room somewhere… He had only climbed through
the hatch two seconds before Hiccup…
Hiccup automatically edged softly, softly
backwards, as he began to suspect what this silence
might mean. And then a familiar smell reached his
nostrils, a faint stink of rotting eggs…
Hiccup would have recognised that
stench anywhere.
That delicate little aroma was the
foul skunk smell of the Murderous
Tribe, and every single member
of the Murderous Tribe was a
loyal Alvinsman servant of
Alvin and the witch.
He could hear
a shuffling of
immense feet,
and a hoarse breathing of not just one great Warrior,
but many.
It only meant one thing.
BETRAYAL.
TREACHERY AND BETRAYAL.
Snotlout had betrayed him.
Down in the depths of Hiccup’s waistcoat,
Toothless was giving Hiccup gentle, desperate nips on
the tummy.
I should run! thought Hiccup. Drop back through
that hatch and fly away on the back of the Windwalker!
But if Snotlout had betrayed him, it meant that
Snotlout did not really know where the Lost Things
were hidden. So there was only one thing left to do.
It was time to put Plan B into action.
Hiccup thrust his head down through the hatch.
Fishlegs was already standing on the Deadly Shadow’s
back, screwing up his courage to squirm up behind
Hiccup.
‘Plan B!’ whispered Hiccup.
Fishlegs looked back at him with shocked eyes.
‘No… not Plan B… Has Snotlout betrayed us
already?’
‘Plan B!’ Hiccup repeated.
And then Hiccup ignored all those instincts
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screaming at him to run away, and moved away from
the hatch, from escape and freedom, back into the
unknown of the darkened room.
Two more steps and Hiccup was grabbed by
rough hands.
‘GOT HIM!’ yelled the Alvinsman, and three
more Warriors seized Hiccup as well, punching him,
hitting him, even though Hiccup put up no resistance.
From darkness he was hauled into dazzling light,
into a room full of chattering people. The noise died
away as soon as he was dragged in.
Blinded by the light, Hiccup recognised the
person who spoke next from the sound of their voice.
It was strangely changed, that voice, muffled
and disfigured into a ghastly shrieking rasp
. But
nonetheless, it was definitely the voice of Hiccup’s
greatest enemy, Alvin the
Treacherous.
‘Why, HICCUP
HORRENDOUS
HADDOCK THE THIRD,
as I live and breathe!
Thank you so much for
joining us…’
~ STATISTICS ~
FEAR FACTOR: ..................... 6
ATTACK: .............................. 7
SPEED: ................................ 5
SIZE: ................................... 2
DISOBEDIENCE: .................. 7
A Winterflesher is a small dragon and
with its mouth shut looks quite sweet,
but actually they are a little like piranhas.
When they attack in shoals they can strip a
deer down to its skeleton in precisely three
minutes.
10. TREACHERY AND
BETRAYAL
As his eyes grew accustomed to the light, Hiccup
realised he must be in the crooked Great Hall, right
in the centre of the floating town. This assembly room
was crudely fashioned out of the upturned hulls of
three ancient Viking ships that had once been sunk by
the reefs of Wrecker’s Bay.
Around the edges of the room were cages,
containing human and dragon prisoners, stacked on
top of one another, right up to the ceiling.
In the centre of the Hall stood the Alvinsmen.
The Alvinsmen were a grim, tattooed, unsightly
crew of vicious and murderous criminals, who had once
been the more unpleasant members of the Visithug,
Murderous, Outcast, Hysteric and Uglithug Tribes.
The nastier side of the Archipelago had all followed
Alvin and the witch, and had grown ghastlier as a
result. It had brought out the worst in them.
The Alvinsmen dragged Hiccup into the centre of
the Hall and pushed him forwards, in front of a man in
an iron mask.
Snotlout swaggered in afterwards.
It took a few seconds for Hiccup to recognise
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the man in the iron mask
as Alvin the Treacherous.
Alvin’s mother had
given Alvin a nasty case of
warts. As Alvin had gained
in power, so too had his warts:
multiplying, blossoming, and blooming in
mushrooming abundance. Big warts had given
birth to little warts, and those little warts in
their turn had grown and swelled and had
babies and burst across his face like joyful
volcanoes spewing pus, ripening and
germinating in such rosy profusion
that his face had swelled beyond all
recognition. What had begun as happy
additions, spotty little adornments to his
beauty, had ended finally in disfigurement.
So Alvin was wearing an iron mask, to
hide his swollen face. Beneath the mask,
the warts had swollen up his lips as
if they had been stung by bees.
That, and the grill across his mouth, gave his breathing
and his voice a dreadful rasping quality.
He was wearing none of the Lost Things… not
even the ruby heart’s stone bracelet.
Alvin was now a Man-of-War.
He was a Warrior made almost entirely out
of metal, from his gleaming hook to the spears and
swords and arrows hanging around his person. Even his
ivory leg was capped in steel. Along with many other
dreadful instruments of war suspended around his
waist, he had not only Dragonmarker helmets, but the
sad remnants of their beards.
On recognition of Hiccup, he let out a yell of
delight that was distorted by the grill of the mask into
a rasping animal screech.
The Witch Excellinor
bounded over on
all fours.
She was a long, lean wolf skeleton with a terrible
dead whiteness to her, bleached of all human kindness
and colour. She ought to have been a woman, but her
semi-baldness and her tattoos and the long white hairs
sprouting in a little beard on her jutting chin seemed to
suggest something else.
In one bound she pinned Hiccup to the floor,
a wild animal about to strike, and she opened up her
terrible jaws with those shark-like teeth, ground and
sharpened into points, and screamed so loudly that she
showered poor Hiccup with her horrible witch-spittle:
‘WE’VE GOT HIM! WE’VE GOT HIM, THE
LITTLE WRETCH! VICTORY IS OURS!’
Hiccup shrank away from her, for she was
terrifying, and whatever dead animal she had been
chewing on had stuck between her teeth and made her
breath stink.
Great cheers went up from the Alvinsmen.
Groans from the Dragonmarker prisoners, held
in the cages on the edges of the room.
The witch reared up on her hind legs,
dragging Hiccup to his feet.
‘Oh, well done, Snotlout, well
done!’ she carolled. ‘Well done,
my poisonous boy! Hiccup
believed you!’
‘He believed
every single subtle
word,’ smirked
Snotlout, high-fiving the
Alvinsmen and even Alvin
himself (which was actually
a slightly painful experience,
because Alvin had a hook rather
than a hand).
‘Oh, this is excellent news,’ sang
Alvin. ‘It means I shall be eating Hiccup’s
heart by this evening…’
‘You’re revolting!’ snapped a voice.
It was coming from inside a large box in the
corner of the room.
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‘Camicazi!’
Oh thank Thor and Woden and pretty
much everybody. Hiccup was quite limp with relief.
‘Are you all right in there, Camicazi?’
‘I’m fine!’ said the voice from the box cheerfully.
‘I could not be finer. Don’t you worry about me,
Hiccup. I am absolutely OK…’
‘Why have you put Camicazi in a box?’ Hiccup
demanded of the witch.
‘I didn’t want the little Escape Artist to escape…’
purred the witch in reply.
The box was neatly wrapped up in heavy chains
and padlocks.
The witch was taking absolutely no chances.
‘Are you sure you’re all right, Camicazi?’ Hiccup
shouted at the box. He hadn’t forgotten her for a
moment in all this time, how could he?
‘Oh yes,’ said the box, ‘it’s roomier in here than
it looks, quite comfy really, and there are plenty of
air holes. But “eating his heart” indeed! You should
be ashamed of yourself, Alvin! And you never learn,
Witch! Hiccup will trick you again, just like he always
does, and it’ll be you who is checkmated, just like all
the other times!’
‘Poor little Bog-Burglar,’ cooed the witch. ‘The
winds of war can change, my pretty love, the winds of
war can change. Your boyfriend has a weakness you
see…’
‘Hiccup is NOT my boyfriend!’ protested the box
furiously.
‘He w
ants to believe the best of people,’
continued the witch, ignoring her. ‘And as a result,
Snotlout seems to have tricked him pretty easily.’
‘That traitor!’ spat the box.
‘I expect you warned Hiccup not to trust
Snotlout, didn’t you, Camicazi?’ purred the witch.
By the silence from the box, the witch knew she
had scored a hit.
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‘Tut tut,’ soothed the witch. ‘You see, my pretty
one? Kings must not be so easily tricked. Can you not
see that you have backed the wrong side? The boy’s
father has failed to find our hideout, the boy’s mother
has failed to steal the Lost Things. The boy himself is so
weak that he has walked straight into my trap. He isn’t
really the right stuff to be a King, is he?’
‘You are evil!’ shouted the voice of Camicazi from
inside the box.
‘Thank you,’ smiled the witch. ‘As I was saying,
the winds of war can change in a heartbeat. And you,
too, can change sides if you want. Everyone in this
room should know that it’s not too late to change your
loyalties and be on the winning side.’
‘NEVER!’ cried
Camicazi. ‘You can’t
see me, Hiccup, but
inside this box, I am
quite definitely NOT
Turning my Back!’
‘Why would
you want to follow
Hiccup? He’s a fool!’
screamed the witch.
‘The fool! The fool!
The fool! Believed the word of someone who has
betrayed him twice before? How could he be such an
idiot?’
‘Because I know there is good in Snotlout,’ said
Hiccup, stubbornly trying to cross his arms, but failing
to do so because one of his arms was sort of floppy.
‘Oh for Thor’s sake, Hiccup,’ snapped Snotlout.
‘Stop forgiving me. It’s really irritating.’
‘Snotlout, you are a TRAITOR!’ came a bellow
from a cage in the corner of the room.
It was Gobber the Belch, Hiccup’s old teacher,
who must have been
captured by the
Alvinsmen.
His magnificent
golden yellow beard,
a sign of his proud
Warriorhood, had been
How To Train Your Dragon: How to Betray a Dragon's Hero Page 9