Day of the Shadow (2 page)

I
t was dawn, or at least that was the theory. The thick clouds of heavy, wet fog that surrounded the
Pearl
had gone from a deep inky black to a paler shade of dark gray, so everyone hoped that that meant the sun was rising somewhere beyond the fog. With luck, one day they might even see the sky again.

According to their instruments, they were approaching the port of Marseille. They should have been able to hear fishermen calling to each other, ropes and barrels thumping against the docks, the clanging of milk wagons and clatter of children playing, and all the other early-morning sounds of a city waking up. But instead, the only sound that penetrated the fog was the
plish-plish-plish
of waves hitting wood and the
creak-creak-creak
of ships bobbing slowly on their moorings.

On the one hand, at least the sounds they
could
hear assured them they were reaching a dock. On the other hand…what was wrong with Marseille?

“I don’t like this,” Billy Turner said gloomily. He patted his pale brow with a handkerchief, then looked at it sadly before tucking it back into his vest. His wife had given him that handkerchief shortly before he set sail on a respectable trading vessel…a lifetime ago, or so it seemed. If he died fighting the Shadow Lord, he would never see his baby son, William, again. Actually, knowing Jack, he’d be lucky ever to get off the
Pearl
no matter what happened with the Shadow Lord.

“What’s not to like?” Jack said, bouncing up to stand beside Billy at the prow of the
Pearl
. “The thick, swirling fog hides our arrival, the ominous silence means everyone is asleep, and the powerful sensation of foreboding means the crew will be extra quiet and cautious, so we can dock and sneak into Marseille completely unobserved.”

CRASH! CRASH! CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!

Everyone on deck flinched and covered their ears as Catastrophe Shane tripped and tumbled down the steps from the quarterdeck. The bucket he’d been carrying flew out of his hands and bounced loudly across the deck, scattering dead fish in all directions. The crashing sounds seemed to echo through the fog as Shane sat up, rubbing his elbow and looking embarrassed.

Jack gave Shane a disgruntled, raised-eyebrow look, and then turned back to Billy. “Or not,” he said.

Billy spotted the end of a wooden dock emerging from the fog ahead of them. He signaled to Carolina at the wheel, and she carefully steered them into the empty berth as the rest of the pirates hurried to trim the sails and drop anchor. There was still no sign of anyone down on the dock. The wooden planks would normally have been full of bustling sailors readying their ships to depart or unloading cargo that had just come in. But today they were smooth and empty, and the silence stretched on uninterrupted.

“What do you think, Alex?” Billy asked as the zombie shuffled up to them. “Could the Shadow Lord have done this?”

Tia Dalma’s spy wore his usual blank expression. His glazed eyes peered down at the swirls of fog slowly drifting around the mooring posts. He was supposed to be an expert on the Shadow Lord, having sailed with him long ago, while Alex was alive. Jack had recently discovered that Alex even wrote the Shadow Lord’s biography—back before he was known as the Shadow Lord, of course, when he had none of his current supernatural powers.

If Jack had asked just a few more questions, he might have found out the Shadow Lord’s true name…but he had no idea that name would mean anything to him, and so he had not yet asked. This was something he would regret later.

“The Shadow Lord could not have done this when I knew him,” Alex said slowly. “But his new powers may include raising fog. I am not sure.”

“Raising fog and enchanting entire towns into silence?” Jack scoffed. “Arrant nonsense.

I’m sure he has much more…er, dark, evil, oooh-I’m-so-scary things to do.”

But he couldn’t help thinking of the town they had seen in Panama—the town that the Shadow Army had pillaged and burned to the ground, leaving not a soul alive. When the fog cleared, would they find the same blackened corpses and smoking shells of houses that they’d seen there? He inhaled cautiously. There was no smell of burning, but perhaps the fog was hiding it.

He twiddled one of the braids in his beard uneasily, watching Diego and Jean lower the gangplank. He found himself almost wishing for Marcella’s loud, obnoxious presence to break the eerie spell. Jack shook his head. Wishing for Marcella…he really must be losing his mind!

“Come on, lads,” he said in a strong, captainy-sounding voice (if he did say so himself). “A few days of baguettes and éclairs will cheer you all up again!” He seized Barbossa’s arm and propelled him down the gangplank ahead of him. His first mate growled angrily and tried to wrestle free, but Jack barely noticed. He was concentrating on trying to look bold and unconcerned. Nothing to worry about here. His kohl-lined eyes narrowed as he tried to peer further through the gray fog.

They walked along the dock toward the silent town with Jack’s crew pressing up close behind them. Ships creaked quietly on either side, but they saw no signs of life. Their breath left puffs of steam in the frigid air.

Where was everybody?

Jack’s boots sounded horribly loud as he stepped off the dock onto the cobblestones of Marseille. He took a few steps forward, squinting. Were those figures in the fog…coming toward him?

It wasn’t until the last second that he spotted the flash of red uniforms under their long dark cloaks.

“It’s a trap!” he yelled. “Everybody run! Back to the—”

“Not so fast,” a deep voice commanded. Jack felt a sharp point poke the small of his back. Beside him, Carolina and Diego turned to each other with matching terrified expressions. They recognized the voice’s Spanish accent. Worse yet, they recognized the voice itself…and the bearded man who had suddenly appeared from the fog, with what appeared to be the entire Spanish navy behind him and a good number of agents from the East India Trading Company as well.

The man’s eyes swept across the motley crew clustered around Jack and Barbossa. Carolina pulled her hood forward a bit more, trying to hide her face. But she knew it was no use.

They were trapped and vastly outnumbered.

The man with the thin, pointy beard poked Jack a little harder with his sword. “We’ve been waiting for you. Captain Jack Sparrow, I presume?” he said.

“Captain!” Jack said triumphantly. “Now why can’t you all get that right?” he asked his crew in an indignant voice. He looked back at the bearded man and seemed to remember what was happening. “I mean,” he backtracked rapidly, “because we should always respect our captain…er, not that I know any Captain Jack Sparrow, of course. Or wait! Here he is!” He shoved Barbossa toward the nearest soldier. “Yup, that’s right, Captain Sparrow! The very same! Um, that’s not his hat, though. Captain Sparrow has much better taste than that…keep that in mind…he wouldn’t be caught dead in a hat with stupid blue feathers.”

Barbossa’s face was a mask of rage.

But the bearded man was not fooled. He took a step closer to Jack. “Don’t bother to lie. We know the truth. You are the captain of the
Black Pearl
…and you have stolen my daughter.”

“A
h, no,” Jack said, trying to ease away from the sword at his back. “What? Never heard of her. Don’t even like Spanish princesses. Or having womenfolk aboard my ship. Always leads to trouble, that.” He shot a glare at Diego, who had been responsible for bringing Carolina aboard in the first place.

“Search them,” Carolina’s father barked. “And their ship. Find my daughter.”

“Now look,” Jack said reasonably, “
I’m
clearly not your daughter, am I? So why don’t you just let
me
go, and then you can go ahead and search the others. Right? Excellent plan, savvy?”

Diego’s heart was hammering in his chest. He couldn’t let them take Carolina! He wouldn’t!

As the nearest soldier reached toward Carolina’s cloak, Diego drew his sword and, in one swift motion, knocked the pistol out of the soldier’s hand. Spinning wildly, he lashed out with his feet and fists. Three more men hit the ground before anyone else could react.

“Uh, really?” Jack said as a thicket of swords sprang up around them. “With these odds? We’re going to—” A bullet whistled past his ear. Barbossa’s toothy smile gleamed as he brandished his pistols. Carolina, Billy, and Jean all drew their weapons and threw themselves at the surrounding soldiers. Chaos instantly erupted.

“Okay, then,” Jack said, neatly twisting away from the sword behind him. He ducked under the sword as Carolina’s father lunged at him, then grabbed the man’s cloak and flung him bodily into the crowd of Trading Company agents. As a whole pile of them crashed to the ground, Jack leaped forward and started throwing their weapons into the harbor behind him. That would help even the odds—at least a little bit!

Now the port was anything but silent. The clang of swords and pistol blasts mingled with the sound of boots pounding on cobblestones and angry yells, along with an occasional strangled yelp of fear, followed by a loud splash. (It was possible some of the weapons Jack was throwing into the harbor still had soldiers attached to them.)

In the confusion, Diego leaped to the top of a barrel and looked around wildly. He spotted Carolina’s dark hair escaping from her cloak a few feet away from him as she dodged and parried the three men she was fighting. In the fog, they didn’t seem to have recognized her yet. Diego launched himself off the barrel and landed on two of the men, knocking them out with a heavy thud. The third man lunged at Carolina, but she ducked and then used his momentum to throw him right over her shoulder into the harbor below.

“Quick!” Diego said, grabbing her hand. “We have to hide you!”

“But the others,” Carolina protested. “We must stay to fight with them!”

“No!” he said, pulling her toward the dock. “There’s no way to win this fight—you’ll just get caught. At least if we can hide you, they won’t be able to blame Jack and the others. They’ll have no proof you were ever on the
Pearl
.”

Carolina had to admit that made sense. If she were captured, her father would exact a terrible punishment on the pirates who had helped her.

But if they couldn’t find her, perhaps they’d believe she wasn’t with them. Although it was likely her friends would still be executed for piracy…she wavered, torn between fear of her father and loyalty to her friends.

That moment of hesitation was all Diego needed. He dragged her behind him, carving a path through the soldiers with his sword as they ran back down the dock toward the
Pearl
. But they couldn’t return to Jack’s ship, which would be seized and searched. They needed somewhere else to hide.…

A gangplank loomed out of the fog in front of him. Another ship! He darted up the wooden slope with Carolina close behind him. At the top, to his horror, he nearly collided with a figure in the fog.

“Here, who’s that?” the sailor yelped, reaching for Diego. But he and Carolina managed to dart away again, leaving the man fumbling blindly.

They ducked behind the mainmast as another sailor, short and swarthy, caught the first one by the arm.

“Captain wants ye,” the second sailor barked. “Things are getting too hot down there for the likes of us.” He nodded at the dock, and then the two of them strode away to the captain’s cabin.

Diego and Carolina sprinted in the other direction, looking for somewhere to hide. Halfway across the deck, Diego nearly fell into the open hatch. The two of them hurried down the ladder into a cramped, narrow hallway. At the other end of it, they could see three men arguing in the galley. If any of them turned around, they’d spot Carolina and Diego right away!

Carolina yanked open the nearest door. It led to a dark storage space, lit only by the dim gray light trickling through one porthole. Piles of ropes and buckets and barrels lay scattered about. Diego pulled the door shut behind them and they hurried over to the porthole, crouching behind a large coil of rope.

Carolina peered anxiously out the small, round window. It was her fault Jack was in such trouble, and she’d just abandoned him! She could hardly see anything through the fog—only the occasional flash of red as another soldier flew off the wharf into the harbor. But the pirates were terribly outnumbered…how long could they keep fighting? And what would happen to them when they were finally overpowered?

A breeze separated the thick clouds for a moment, and Carolina spotted Jack prancing backward down the dock, fending off six Spanish soldiers who were trying to get to his beloved ship. He did an impressive flip onto a barrel and leaped from one side of the dock to the other, spinning in the air to kick two men while whisking a third’s rapier out of his hand with his sword. Five more men in East India Trading Company uniforms ran toward him, drawing their pistols. The fog closed in, blocking Carolina’s view, and she pressed her hands to her mouth. She was close to tears.

“We should go back,” she whispered, wringing her hands. “We shouldn’t have left our
capitan
!”

“That particular
capitan
would probably be proud of us for running away, and you know it,” Diego said.

“But—”

“Imagine if your father had caught you!” Diego insisted, seizing her hands in his. “You’d be on a ship back to
el Cruel
and
San Augustin
by noon, with a horrible marriage and a miserable life ahead of you, and I—” He stopped himself, biting his lip and digging his fingers into the prickly rope beside them.

Carolina gasped. “You would be hanged! Or worse…You’re right, Diego—he would kill you for helping me escape. I didn’t even think of that!” She threw her arms around him and they hugged each other tightly, their hearts pounding.

That hadn’t even been what Diego was going to say. He hadn’t thought of what would become of him—only of the despair he would feel if he had to watch Carolina being dragged back to the sinister old governor who planned to marry her.

Carolina broke away and peered out the window again. “I think the fog is clearing a little bit. Don’t you?”

Diego rubbed the glass and blinked at the swirling clouds outside. The fog seemed to be shifting and moving faster than before. Suddenly he caught a glimpse of the dock.

There was Jack, balanced precariously on a tall post, his arms windmilling frantically as he toppled backward into the harbor. And wait…there was the
Black Pearl
…and there was Marseille, slowly slipping away behind them.

The ship was putting out to sea…with Diego and Carolina on board!