With a thud, Lucian's heavy boot heel made contact with the platform's armoured surface. He stood before the functionary and addressed him in the voice he liked to use to impress the locals.
'Please convey to your master my thanks for his hospitality. I greet you in the name of the Arcadius.
The rogue traders had been led from the landing platform, through the merchants' quarter and to the outer reaches of the vastness of the governor's palace, accompanied all the while by ranks of marching household guard. The palace itself must have been one of the oldest structures in the city — indeed, on the world — for its every surface was layered with strata of dust. Heraldic banners made tattered and threadbare by the passing of millennia lined its long passages. Electro-lumen flickered and guttered in the high, vaulted ceilings, where vat-grown cyber cherubs capered in and out of the shadows. Parchments and prayer strips were affixed to every surface by great gobbets of sealing wax, endless votives imploring the God-Emperor for His mercy and blessings. As the group neared the centre of the palace, the character of the place changed. The atmosphere became thicker, somehow heavy, as if made sluggish by the weight of ages. Incense cloyed at the nostrils, but the scent failed to mask the fact that the exact same substance had been burned, day in and day out, for uncounted centuries. The high ceilings were waxy with its build-up. Statuettes and gargoyles crowded point-arched recesses, gold leaf skin peeling from their every surface. Cables snaked across walls and along floors, laid reverently, but with little in the way of art or understanding. Small scrips attached to terminus points indicated the identity of the technician, and the date he had attended to his labour. Many such cables had been laid many centuries in the past, and when severed had had more prayer seals applied, so that the most damaged formed riotous, fluttering garlands draped across the walls.
As the group came upon the regions of the inner palace, a flock of servo-skulls joined them. The actual skulls of the most favoured of the Imperium's servants, these were preserved after death and implanted with all manner of machine devices, in order for the previous owner to go on serving his master long after his passing. A rudimentary machine spirit guided each, causing it to hover at shoulder height upon tiny anti-grav generators. The lead servo-skull was fitted with a heavy bronze bell, which it visibly laboured to hold aloft whilst it veered from left to right, its ringing preceding the rogue traders as diey progressed down the dusty corridors. Another sported a large, mechanical eye that clicked and whirred as its lenses adjusted, hovering right at Lucian's shoulder and evidently recording or examining him for some unknowable purpose. Another had attached to it a set of miniature, crab-like pincers, with which it dived to grab tiny, perhaps imagined, impediments to the group's progress, whilst the last appeared to sniff at the rogue traders through its bony cavity of a nose.
Finally, the procession reached the atrium of the inner hall. The mighty brass doors that led into the governor's audience chamber dominated this area, their tops lost ten metres or more above in the incense-bound shadows of the vaulted ceilings. Scenes from legend were carved in bas-relief upon the doors' surfaces. The Emperor stood astride a globe, his sword arcing to hack at the neck of a writhing serpent. Lucian had viewed many such scenes on his journeys, but they never failed to move him: the sight of the most holy of men to have lived, sacrificing all, that mankind might survive in a universe set upon nothing less than his destruction. Lucian was a rogue trader, he well knew the meaning of this.
As the last of the household guard formed up in parade ground precision at either side of the trio, the functionary addressed the rogue traders.
'Are you ready my lords?
Lucian turned to each of his offspring, Korvane indicating his eagerness for the coming proceedings with a bow of his head, Brielle hers with a wry smile.
'Well enough' Lucian inclined his head to the degree required by protocol, indicating to the functionary that the rogue traders were ready to meet with the Imperial Commander of Mundus Chasmata.
The functionary activated a mechanical device hidden in the depths of his cavernous sleeves. An instant later, mighty pistons at either side of the portal strained until the forces required to haul open the vast doors were achieved. Clouds of choking dust billowed at the doors' passing, a signal to Lucian that they had not been opened in some considerable time. A sure message, Lucian noted, that the group passing through was to be received in honour.
The doors swung fully open, and Lucian and his children saw for the first time the audience chamber of Culpepper Luneberg the Twenty-ninth, Imperial Commander, upon the soil of his own world second in authority only to the High Lords of Terra themselves.
The group found itself stepping out onto a landing, an expansive space to the top of a vast flight of stairs. These swept down many hundreds of steps to a wide floor, and beyond that another raised area appeared to house Luneberg's, currently empty, throne. The entire area was enclosed in a chamber several times taller than it was wide, and vast pillars of stone supported a roof that was entirely lost to the eye in shadow and incense haze. Every surface was caked in pealing, tarnished gold leaf, dust of countless centuries built up in drifts and tumbling in powdery falls from recesses. Gossamer webs, presumably those of spiders, or some local equivalent, stretched from one leering gargoyle to the next, the light of hovering electro lumens twinkling where it reflected off the thin, silken strands.
Lucian strode to the top of the stairs, taking a moment to cast his glance around the vast space. The hovering lights swarmed the chamber, their flight describing random patterns across the space and creating bubbles of flickering yellow light within the gloom. The floor at the bottom of the steps appeared crowded with figures, although Lucian could make out scant details from his position.
So far, little of what Lucian had seen surprised him in any way. Being a rogue trader, he and his kind occupied a unique position within the upper echelons of the Imperium. Unlike the teeming billions of Imperial subjects crowding the million and more domains of the Emperor's rale, rogue traders had cause to escape the worlds of their birth and go forth to visit others. Most worlds in the Imperium were largely self-sufficient, or at most inter-dependent with others in the immediate region.
It was only the most privileged who would ever leave his world, unless he was conscripted into the Imperial Guard and sent to fight some far-away war, never to return home again. Rogue traders carried their Charter of Trade as a badge of office, with it gaining entrance to places others would be executed for visiting. Lucian had participated in the ritual currently playing out on scores of occasions. The places and the people differed, as did the grandeur of the surroundings, but whether mud hut, rad-shelter, chapel-city or xenos-nest, the pattern was invariably a familiar one.
Half way down the flight of stairs, Lucian was able to discern some details of the milling crowds at its base. The courtiers, for Lucian could now make out that these people were at the least minor nobility, wore elaborate costumes of the most rare of materials, but the fabrics were faded and tattered, as tarnished with age as the architecture all around. At his approach, periwigs turned, small clouds of powder or dust, Lucian was unsure which, puffing around the nobles' heads and causing them to cough demurely. The women wore their hair in elaborate steeples, but rogue strands lent them a bedraggled appearance quite at odds with the pomp and ceremony of the event.