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.
Approaching the bottom of the stairs, Lucian could now examine in closer detail the nearer of the courtiers. Many wore exquisite jewellery, tiny gems that twinkled and cycled through all the colours of the spectrum. Lucian supposed they may be some locally manufactured curio, but had an inkling they were procured off-world, for Chasmata was not known for the manufacture of such fine jewellery, had it been so, he would have known. Many sported bracelets and necklaces fashioned from some unfamiliar resin or ceramic, again, unlikely to be of local pedigree. He examined the faces even closer. Both men and women appeared bored, as if the proceedings unfolding around them were in some manner tiresome. Was this some highborn affectation? Lucian had certainly encountered those who feigned haughty disinterest in the goings-on around them, but rarely in an entire crowd of people. He sought to make eye contact with those closest. A nearby man turned away from his gaze as soon as he met it. A woman fluttered spidery eyelashes before turning pointedly to engage her neighbour.