Ravenspell Book 2: The Wizard of Ooze by David Farland Page B

just like Napoleon Bonaparte.
    “What’s the meaning of this?” he cried with an accent that was half French and half a Texas drawl. General Crawley knew that all kinds of things could be carried in a plastic bottle. It could be filled with biological weapons like the Ebola virus. It could even hold chemical weapons like . . . mustard gas!
    “The government folks have been running me around in circles all day,” Latonia Pumpernickel growled. “Now you’re going to sit down and watch this tape, or I’ll squirt you in the eye!”
    “With mustard gas?”
    “With Polish mustard,” she threatened. “The hottest kind.”
    The general backed away, heart thumping, while Latonia set her video camera on the table, turned it on, and replayed the images she had captured on her viewer.
    “Those are mice,” she said needlessly as he peered at the spear-carrying mice attacking a tarantula.
    “This can’t be real,” the general said. “You weren’t sent here by those guys at Industrial Light and Magic, were you?”
    “Oh, it’s real,” Latonia Pumpernickel said. “These mice are up to something. In fact, I don’t think they’re even mice!”
    With that, the scene switched, and General Crawley’s eyes popped wide. He reached under his shirt and scratched nervously. He watched as several mice hopped aboard a tiny flying saucer and flew away. The date stamp on the picture showed that it had been filmed earlier that day. A creepy chill stole down his back.
    “Good grief,” said General Crawley, “that’s the craft the Air Force shot down this morning!” General Crawley’s people had been monitoring the Air Force’s frequencies on their CB radio.
    “I’m happy to hear it,” Latonia said. “Then maybe they got the ringleaders. But there are still hundreds of spear-toting mice in my backyard.”
    General Crawley stared hard at the mice in the picture. These weren’t normal mice. “Well,” he said in a nasal Texas drawl, “in my opinion, these spear-toting vermin pose a significant threat to the safety and sovereignty of our fair planet. I have no choice but to blow them to kingdom come.” He smiled in glee as he pictured the mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb brightening the sky.

Chapter 12
    TELEPATHIC MESSAGES
    Your brain creates an electric field, while the brains of those around you create similar electric fields. Therefore, it seems only logical that the time will come when we learn to send messages simply by directing our thoughts, connecting the electric field of one mind to that of another. All it really would require is a person of superior intelligence, such as mine.
—THORN

“I am the smartest mouse in the world. It only makes sense that I’d be a telepath, too.”
    Ben slept little that night. The pine nuts he had eaten lay in his stomach feeling heavy, as if he’d eaten lumber for dinner. He lay awake, listening.
    Above him, enormous fir trees creaked and swayed in the cold starlight. Their tiny leaves hissed, as if they were the voices of faraway dead, and it seemed to him that the trees spoke. They groaned in the night as if in anger at the memory of chainsaws. They sputtered and cracked and made spitting sounds.
    Ben’s mind was weary, and he wondered if the trees were angry with him, with mankind.
    “I didn’t do it,” Ben whispered to the trees. “I never tried to cut you down.”
    But the trees moaned and cracked anyway, and their needles hissed curses in the wind.
    The moon rose, gleaming like a pearl made of ice. It bathed the snow in shades of silver. Coyotes began to wail up in the hills, their voices rising and falling eerily.
    Never had Ben felt so alone, and he wondered for a long time what his mother was doing. Was she still in her car, driving the streets, wearily calling his name?
    Ben kept watch for long hours, until Thorn began fidgeting in his sleep and finally woke and asked Ben if he wanted to be relieved.
    Ben tried to sleep, but he kept remembering something that