One slid aside beneath his hand. Beyond lay a chill, bleak laboratory chamber.
Still smiling, Zenaor led the shackled Baemae forward ... shoved him through a port-like door into a transparent cubicle mounted on a stand.
"Now ... one moment...." With quick efficiency, the chief of barons closed the cubicle's door and sealed it. Then, taking a tiny glass ampule from the nearest bench, he dropped it into a slot atop the cubicle and brought down a crusher valve upon it.
The ampule splintered. For an instant light glinted on sparkling, dust-like grains descending, floating out in lazy spirals through the sealed cubicle's still air.
But only for an instant. For then, suddenly, the grains were growing, uniting, multiplying, melding. In a finger-snap, grey slime began to form on the unit's glistening, sterile floor.
A slime that swirled and crawled and eddied....
The shackled serfman screamed.
Not that anyone could hear it. The cubicle was far too skillfully designed for that.
With grim satisfaction, cold appraisal, the Lord Zenaor watched the slime-tide rippling higher. Carefully, he noted reaction time ... the victim's grimaces and contortions and frantic terror.