Day of the Shadow

by Rob Kidd

  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.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Ah, 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!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Where is she?” Carolina’s father demanded. He lashed out, striking the soldier who knelt before him. The violent blow knocked the trembling man to the cobblestones. “Where is my daughter?” the Spanish nobleman shouted. “And WHERE IS JACK SPARROW?”

  Barbossa snorted in disgust. The fire of battle had faded from his eyes, and his feathered hat was askew on his head. He couldn’t reach up to straighten it; the chains on his arms made it difficult to move at all. He sat back to back with Billy Turner, whose head was resting glumly on his knees.

  “I knew this would happen,” Billy muttered. “I knew if I stayed with Jack too long, something terrible would happen to me.”

  “Can’t be trusted, can he?” Barbossa murmured, low enough so that only Billy could hear. “When danger threatens, where is he? Scarpered off! Saving his own skin!”

  “Typical Jack,” Billy said bitterly. “Now I’ll never get home…never see my beloved family again….”

  “Aye, it’s a right shame,” Barbossa said, twisting the knife deeper. “To tear a man away from his bonny lass and bright-eyed boy! What kind of friend would do such a thing? And what kind of captain would desert his crew and ship at the peak of battle? Even a pirate should have more honor than that.”

  “Not Jack,” Billy said. He shook his head. “Oh, Jack. I want to believe in you…but you make it so difficult.”

  Barbossa smiled grimly. Finally he had found a weak link in the group of friends around Jack. But it wouldn’t do him much good if he ended up swinging from a rope tomorrow. He studied the Spaniards who were guarding the trussed-up crew. One of them poked Jean with his toe and then jumped away as Jean tried to bite his leg.

  The Pearl ’s first mate wondered where Carolina and Diego had disappeared to. It made sense that Jack would evade capture—that was the kind of misbegotten luck he always had. But the two Spanish fugitives couldn’t have escaped into Marseille together without being spotted. So where had they gone?

  “Señor,” one of the soldiers said nervously, drawing their leader’s attention. “We have found another one on the ship, señor. But…but he is very odd…I do not know what kind of man he is.”

  “Show me, show me,” Carolina’s father said gruffly.

  Alex the zombie shuffled forward between two soldiers, and Carolina’s father recoiled at his slack gray flesh and pale, staring eyes. No one had put any chains on the zombie yet, for fear his arms would simply drop off if any additional weight were put on them.

  “What is that?” the nobleman barked in Spanish. He jumped back as a piece of Alex’s shoulder fell off with a tiny splat. Whisking a white silk handkerchief out of his vest, Carolina’s father pressed it to his nose and blinked several times with a horrified expression. “Whatever it is, we don’t want it.” He waved dismissively. “Let it go. Send it away! Don’t let it near us!”

  The soldiers steered Alex away from the other prisoners and gave him a nudge with the butt of their rifles. The zombie paused for a moment and then shambled slowly away into the fog. Barbossa wondered if Alex might try getting a message to Tia Dalma. Then again, why would that creepy mystic help them? All she seemed to care about was Jack…and nobody knew where he was.

  Not even Jack was exactly sure where Jack was. One moment he had been hopping gleefully from post to barrel to pier, slicing and whirling and parrying and thrusting and generally winning, as he usually did (or at least, as he usually thought he did). Then the next moment he was clinging to a piece of driftwood, soaking wet, with the sounds of battle fading above him in the fog.

  Surely he hadn’t fallen off the dock! Someone must have pushed him. That was the only explanation. That blackguard, whoever he was! Jack had a thought and his hand went quickly to the top of his head. He breathed a sigh of relief. His hat was still clapped firmly to his head.

  He could hear other men splashing in the harbor around him, many of them yelling for their fellow soldiers to come pull them out. They made enough noise that he could swim quietly around them without being noticed.

  A slow current was carrying him away from the dock and the others. But from the sounds that drifted down through the fog, Jack could tell that his pirates had lost. He heard sharp voices rise as the Spanish argued with the Trading Company agents over what to do with them. One of them mentioned the name of a Marseille prison, and Jack winced. He’d been in there once. Not for long, of course. There wasn’t a prison in the world could hold Jack Sparrow! Well, so far, anyway.

  That had been a particularly nasty prison, though. Jack stopped swimming for a moment, wondering what would happen if he climbed back to the dock and tried to start up the fight again. Part of him wanted to free his crew…after all, he couldn’t sail the Pearl by himself.

  Then somet
hing moved beside him, leaping out of the water to nip at his ear and then vanish again into the dark waves. He gave the water a wide-eyed, alarmed look and spotted tiny shadows swirling ominously below the surface. The last time he’d been in the ocean, the creatures of his shadow-sickness had nearly drowned him.

  No, he couldn’t rescue his crew now, even if he wanted to. He needed the next vial, and quickly. He needed his full strength, and he needed to make sure he reached the vial before the Shadow Lord went looking for it.

  Jack ducked lower in the water and started to kick his feet, moving further away from his enemies…and further away from his captured friends.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A bright ray of sunlight slanted through the porthole into Diego’s face, waking him up. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Carolina was asleep with her head on his shoulder. A day had passed since their escape, but they hadn’t dared to leave this room yet. They were still hidden in the dark storage room, leaning up against the big coil of rope. Diego could hear the scritchscritching of tiny claws among the sacks and barrels around them. Mice and rats didn’t bother him anymore. He’d spent enough time with them on his other trips as a stowaway, including a short spell in the hold of the Black Pearl before Jack had found him there.

  Diego’s legs felt cramped and prickly. He stretched them gingerly, careful not to knock anything over that might make a noise and draw attention to this room. As he moved, Carolina shifted and woke up as well.

  “Shhh,” he reminded her, putting one finger to his lips.

  She nodded, got to her knees, and peered out the porthole. Outside, the fog had finally lifted. The sun sparkled on the blue-green sea and dolphins splashed cheerfully around the ship. Far in the distance, Carolina could see a dark green border of land lying on the horizon. From the position of the sun, she guessed they were sailing through the Mediterranean, heading east, and that land was the north coast of Africa.