How to Twist a Dragon's Tale (Hiccup) (10 page)

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"Maybe!" squeaked Fishlegs. "What happens if
not?"

Hiccup said nothing.

"Oh
goody!"
smiled Camicazi, absolutely delighted at the thought of a Truly Perilous Quest.

And from the front of her waistcoat she produced the Fire-Stone.

"Where did you get that?" gasped Hiccup.

"I grabbed it from under Stoick's fat nose while he was busy singing," said Camicazi breezily.

Humungous turned to go, but Hiccup stopped him.

"Where do you think
you're
going?" said Hiccup. "I need you to show us the way to Lava Lout Island."

"I suppose I am still your Bardiguard," said Humungous. "But I will only go with you as far as the island. Climbing up the Volcano is Hero work, and I am out of the Hero Business forever."

"Right," said Hiccup briskly, "all we have to do now is borrow a fast boat, sail to Lava-Lout Island, chuck the Stone in the Volcano before it explodes, and sail back home again. Follow me."

"That's
all
we have to do now?" squealed Fishlegs.

They had to fight their way through the crowds of fleeing Vikings at the Harbor.

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The ship they borrowed,
The Peregrine Falcon,
was the fastest Hooligan ship in the fleet.

"We'll bring it back," said Hiccup to himself, feeling very guilty, "and if we don't... well, if we don't, it won't matter anyway."

On that cheery note, with the sun climbing high in the sky on Sun'sday Sunday, Hiccup, Fishlegs, Camicazi, Humungously Hotshot the ex-Hero, Toothless, the Windwalker, and the White Dragon sailed off out of Hooligan Harbor on the Quest-to-Stop-the-Volcano-from-Exploding.

[Image: Smoke.]

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11. THE-QUEST-TO-STOP-THE VOLCANO-FROM-EXPLODING

The Peregrine Falcon
was a very fast ship.

It was still absolutely baking hot, but there was a feeling in the air that the weather was about to change, that it was building up for something stormy.

For months, the seas around Berk had been as eerily flat and glassy as a puddle. But overnight, a hot wind had sprung up, carrying with it large flakes of soot from the scorched devastation of the Highest Point and sending them flurrying across the Isle of Berk and out over the Sullen Sea like autumn leaves.

Only a couple of hours later, this sweltering wind had blown them right out of the Archipelago and into the Open Sea. There was a steady stream of dragons

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fleeing from Lava-Lout Island overhead, and they were joined by an ominous cloud of smoke coming from the same direction. Every now and then there was a rumble, but it was not clear whether it was thunder, or the Volcano.

I wish I could have explained to my father what I was doing ...
thought Hiccup, looking wistfully back at the outline of the Isle of Berk. Somehow, without meaning to, and while trying his hardest, he always seemed to be letting his father down.
I wish he didn't think I was a traitor... if we don't succeed, he'll think I really DID run away... If only he had LISTENED to what I was trying to say.

Stoick rarely listened.

Fishlegs clung on to his Running-Away Suitcase, muttering to himself, "This is not a good idea ... this is not a good idea ... this is not a good idea ..."

"I'm not quite sure what the guy with the face like a fish is contributing to the Team, Hiccup," whispered Humungous. "You're the Leader, and the little blonde is the Stone-Carrier, but what is
he
doing? He seems rather a negative influence."

"Don't be fooled by appearances," Hiccup whispered back. "He
is
a Berserk."

"Really?" said Humungous, in great surprise. In

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his experience, Berserks were generally rather LARGER, and did not normally suffer from asthma, eczema, and knock-knees.

Eventually the outline of Lava-Lout Island appeared on the horizon, with its smoking Volcano, and this was such an ominous sight that even Toothless lost some of his cheekiness, and went to perch on Hiccup's shoulder.

Misery seemed to have been trapped up in the island for so long now, the land was trembling in feverish shivers; great reverberating trembles that rocked the sea crazily around it.

[Image: A ship in the middle of the sea.]

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The roasted landscape was dotted with these greeny-yellow spots like pimples or pustules, as if they were symptoms of some deadly contagious disease, but as they drew nearer and nearer it became clear that these were not spots but Eggs, thousands and thousands of evil Exterminator Eggs, waiting for the Volcano to explode so they could hatch and spread their dusky devastation across the whole of the Archipelago.

They found a long scoop of a beach to land on, curved like a horseshoe, and
The Peregrine Falcon
skimmed across the shallow waters, until its belly landed on the black sand, and the boat came to a sludgy stop.

Clearly, the Windwalker was not going to set foot on the island.

Humungous sighed. "I'll take the boat out a bit, and hang around, just in case ... just in case ..."

Humungous never finished the end of that sentence, but it lingered, unspoken, in the air ...
just in case, by some outrageous miracle, you DO come back here alive.

"Good luck, guys," called Humungous.

The three small unlikely Heroes began to trudge reluctantly up the beach.

Fishlegs took his suitcase with him.

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He knew that it was stupid, but somehow he felt a bit
safer
with his Running-Away Suitcase. It gave him courage. As if he could leave at a moment's notice if he wanted to. And, of course, he'd have some nice clean socks and knickers to change into when he got to Valhalla.

[Image: The Island.]

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12. WELCOME TO LAVA-LOUT ISLAND

The Exterminator Eggs were so numerous that they found themselves picking their way through them. The Eggs had been laid hundreds of years earlier, so they were embedded very deeply into the soil, and grass, moss, heather, and bracken had grown over them over the years. Now, however, all the vegetation had been burned down, so it had exposed them like gigantic fat white maggots.

A furious, frenzied, scratching noise was coming from within them. It wasn't clear at first what this noise was, but as the Vikings climbed higher they began to come across Eggs that did not have the white, greasy opaqueness of bacon fat like their brother-Eggs further down.

These Eggs had skin that was wearing thin, and fine lines were appearing all over the surface, like cracks on china that was about to break. They were clearly close to hatching, and on some the shell was so fine that it had become see-through, and the Exterminator fledgling was clearly visible within, all twisted and snarled in an angry knot.

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These fledglings had grown so large over the centuries, and were so cramped in their Egg prisons, that their limbs were contorted into the most grotesque positions, and it was the ends of their talons that were making that feverish scratching noise, as they tore at the hard shell exterior that was keeping them trapped.

Once you have looked into the eyes of an Exterminator, it is impossible to forget them. The look in an Exterminator's eyes, of pure, concentrated, white hot FURY, the irises vibrating with pinpoint anger, is a look that haunts a person through their waking hours and in their nightmares forever after.

The Vikings had to climb over these horrible, slimy see-through Eggs, and as they did so the eyes of the Exterminators fixed upward on them in a frenzy of impotent rage, and the scratching became even more screechily furious.

"Oh ... yuck ... this is vile ..." groaned Fishlegs, giving a shriek of horror as he slipped and fell with his face pressed up against one of the Eggs, with only that hard exterior separating him from the manic eye and madly scraping sword-talon of the Creature within.

Once he had made sure that the carnivores really

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were
trapped inside the Eggs, Toothless couldn't resist the opportunity of teasing them, of course.

He flapped right up and landed on the Eggs, sticking his tongue out and making faces at the imprisoned beasts, which drove them into extremities of temper, and they tried to throw themselves at him, but the most they could achieve, of course, was to make their Egg rock slightly in its bed of burned-out carbon.

Toothless thought that this was a very good joke, and carried on doing it, despite Hiccup telling him repeatedly NOT to infuriate the Creatures any more than they had to.

Dragons have a cruel streak, and I'm afraid that Toothless even made up a song about the Exterminators, which he sang as he cheekily swooped over the Eggs making farting noises, and setting them rolling down the hill with his nose.

[Image: A dragon and a fire stone.]

"Can't c-c-catch me

O w-w-weedy little Extermi-babies

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Frogs without legs

Tadpoles in your cradles

I can see youcrying in your Eggs

But you c-c-cant... catch... ME!"

Everywhere they walked there were these grim entrances to the Fire-Gold Mines, out of which great clouds of steam mixed with gold dust were billowing. Hiccup swallowed hard, peering down the sinister dark holes, cruel bright streams of magma snaking through the bottom of them, and imagining the poor Windwalker forced to crawl down there, struggling like a fly without wings.

The Lava-Lout Village gave an even grimmer vision of what the life of Humungous must have been like, kept for fifteen years as a slave by these greedy savages.

[Image: A dragon and a fire stone.]

There were CAGES everywhere, manacles, chains, whips, weapons of all description. Huts with

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barred windows, beds of stone or iron. No wonder poor Humungous didn't want to step on this cursed island again.

Hiccup, Fishlegs, and Camicazi walked on, Fishlegs lagging slightly behind, puffing away like anything, but still stubbornly dragging his Running-Away Suitcase.

Every now and then they came across these unusual man-made Statues, of the kind that Humungously Hotshot had been describing, raised up high on a prominent rock so that they were clearly visible to all the Eggs round about.

They were Statues of a Face, three times as large as any man, and the Face did look just a
little
bit like what Hiccup remembered Alvin the Treacherous looking like.

But there was no sign of Alvin the Treacherous himself.

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It had all been surprisingly easy so far.

They were now only four or five hundred meters from the top of the Volcano, and they had reached it without bumping into anything nasty at all.

All they had to do
now
was get to the summit, throw the Fire-Stone over the edge, and then run back down to the Harbor.

... They were nearly there ...

They were nearly there...

Only fifty meters to go, when Something put its black foot over the lip of the Volcano above them.

[Image: A dragon and fine stones.]

A black foot with five claws sprouting out of it,

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each claw as broad and sharp and gleaming as a SWORD.

Out of the top of the Volcano, like a gigantic slimy slug, slithered the revoltingly muscly figure of a huge
EXTERMINATOR
, three times as big as a lion. Green saliva frothed from its fangs. Great clouds of steam snorted out of its flaring furious nostrils.

Its face was contorted in a ghastly grimace of anger, eyes popping with a fury that burned like acid. Its tail and its horns appeared to be on fire. It reared up on its hind legs, slicing through the air with its ten terrible sword-claws, and through the transparent wall of its fireproof chest you could see its two great black hearts pumping its boiling-hot black blood, sending it shooting through its body at twenty times the speed and pressure of the blood of any other living creature.

It opened its terrible mouth to
ROAR
, and it was a noise that sent shivers screeching down the Vikings' spines and set their hearts racing as quick as a panic-stricken rabbit's.

It seemed impossible that a Creature this wild could be controlled by a human being, but in the Exterminator's mouth was the choking copper-red slab of a metal bit, and on its back, in between its

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