The fog came down over the lake like a lid.
One moment I could see the far shore and the stands and three hundred metres of grey water full of flotillas. The next, I could see my own prow and perhaps twenty metres beyond it, and then nothing—a soft, wet whiteness that swallowed sound as well as light. Somewhere to my left a hull fired, a dull thump, and the flash of it lit the fog from inside like a lamp behind paper, and then it was gone.
"Phase two," said Valerie's voice, from everywhere and nowhere. "The buoys no longer pay."
All around me in the white, a hundred captains realised at once what that meant.
For twenty minutes, the points had been in the buoys. Now the only way to score was to sink something. Everyone who'd spent the first phase guarding a buoy was suddenly sitting very still in the middle of a lake, holding three hulls full of their own mana, with no idea who was twenty metres away.
