Ravenspell Book 2: The Wizard of Ooze by David Farland Read Free Book Online Page A

out of a cloudless night sky and struck him on the head. His whiskers were singed and crooked, and all of the hair on his head suddenly frizzed out and turned a grizzled white.
    He stopped hopping, then peered about at the other mice. With his dark eyes and grizzled hair, Thorn looked a lot like Albert Einstein, Ben thought.
    “Am I? Am I smart now?” Thorn asked.
    “I don’t know,” Amber said. “Do you feel smart?”
    “His head does look a little bit . . . fatter,” Bushmaster noted.
    Thorn suggested, “That could be because of all of the brain cells crammed inside!”
    Ben, Amber, Bushmaster, and Lady Blackpool all waited expectantly for Thorn to say something smart, but he just stood there looking stupid.
    “I know,” Ben said. “How about a test?”
    “Good idea,” Lady Blackpool said.
    “Okay,” Ben said, thinking back to his story problems at school. “Suppose that there is a pond a mile away from here, to the east. And let’s suppose that you are walking toward the pond at a rate of sixty feet a minute. How long would it take you to fall in the pond and drown?”
    “Interesting question!” Thorn said. “Let’s see. That’s 5280 feet divided by sixty. That would be eighty-eight minutes travel time. It is a trick question, though, of course, because we must also add in roughly two minutes and thirty-two seconds for drowning time. Thus, if I were to head off to the pond right now, it would take me one and a half hours and thirty-two seconds to fall in the pool and drown!”
    “Hooray!” Amber shouted. “He really is smart!”
    Bushmaster, Thorn, Amber, and Lady Blackpool began dancing in a circle, shouting, “He’s smaa-art. He’s smaa-art. Thorn is a geeenius!”
    But Ben stood there, not feeling quite sure, and muttered, “Anyone who walks for an hour and a half just to drown himself in a mud puddle isn’t smarter than Einstein.”

Chapter 7
    GENIUS
    There is no such thing as an evil genius, for wickedness—in any degree—is ultimately self-destructive, and therefore foolish.
—THORN

“Something cruel, something they won’t expect . . .”
    Deep in the heart of the earth, Sebaceous Ooze crawled on the floor of his cavern, leaving a copious trail of slime upon a layer of volcanic ash.
    “This is how we build our slobber goblins,” he told his son, Fluke Gutcrawler.
    Dutifully, Fluke oozed behind his father, leaving a smaller trail of slime. But his hearts just weren’t into it. He peered back, and his efforts seemed pitiful.
    “I don’t understand, Father,” Fluke said. “You plan to destroy the whole world? With slime? How can that be? Even you and I working together can never make enough.”
    “Ah, but that’s the wondrous part, my son,” Sebaceous Ooze said. “Soon we will cut ourselves in half, and grow new worms. And they’ll divide again, and so on and so on. In a few months, there will be millions and millions of us. We can harvest the slobber from all of our offspring, create rivers and seas of worm goop, and with it we shall raise an army large enough to rule the world!”
    “That sounds like a lot of work,” Fluke objected.
    “Not if we make enough slobber goblins. We’ll build an army of them, or things like them. We can make them in different shapes: snot spiders and creeping oozes, mucus monsters and booger babies.”
    Fluke’s father had never really talked openly about his plan. He had hinted about parts of it, but not all.
    “Together, my son,” Sebaceous said, “we shall clobber the world with slobber and rule the world with drool!”
    “As long as the trains in Italy run on time,” Fluke said. “That is all that I care about.”
    “Good,” Sebaceous Ooze said, an evil grin forming on his wormy face. “Now, about those rodents who tried to spy on me last night . . . We must come up with a plan to get rid of them. Something cruel, something they won’t expect . . .”
    Sebaceous Ooze bent his evil mind to the task at hand while Fluke