10 Treachery and Betrayal

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

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.

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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!'