"She's seen us," Tor shouted. "Starting to come around. Oh! A three-master. Caravel rigged." We were a caravel ourselves, a stubby, pot-bellied vessel high in the bows and stern.

The Old Man's face brightened. Glowed. The ship we were hunting was a caravel. Maybe this was The One.

That was what we called her aboard Vengeful Dragon. No one knew her true name, though she had several given her by other sailors. The Ghost Ship. The Hell Ship. The Phantom Reever. Like that.

"What colors?" Colgrave demanded.

Tor did not answer. We were not that close. Colgrave realized it and did not ask again.

I did not know if the phantom were real or not. The story had run the western coast almost since the beginning of sea trade, changing to fit the times. It told of a ghost ship crewed by dead men damned to sail forever, pirating, never to set foot on land, never to see Heaven or Hell, till they had redeemed themselves for especially hideous crimes. The nature of their sins had never been defined.

We had been hunting her for a long time, pirating ourselves while we pursued the search. Someday we would find her. Colgrave was too stubborn to quit till he had settled his old score. Or till we, like so many other crews who had met her, fed the fish while she went on to her next kill.

The Old Man's grievance involved the fire that had ruined his face, withered his left arm, and left him with a rolling limp, like a fat galleon in a heavy ground swell. The phantom, like so many pirates, always fired her prey when finished with them. Colgrave, somehow, had survived such a burning.

His entire family, though, had gone down with the vessel.

The Captain, apparently, had been a rich man. Swearing he would find The One, He had purchased the Vengeful Dagon. Or so the story went, as it had been told to us.

None of us knew how he had gotten rich in the first place. All we really knew about him was that he had a terrible temper, that he compensated for his disfigurement by dressing richly, that he was a genius as a pirate, and that he was absolutely insane.