Solomon - Chancellery Court: Solomon is a poisoned and decrepit Hive World, given over almost exclusively to meeting the demands of the Departmento Munitorum by millennia-old accord. The callous and unflinching needs of the Munitorum has rendered the planet barren and despairing. Solomon was long ago chosen to house the labyrinthine edifice of the Halls of the Chancellery Court, resulting in the planet's becoming the Munitorum's seat of power in the Calixis Sector.The Chancellery Court is a conglomeration of legal apparatus, chambers, and archives that deals in the nightmarishly tangled business of Administratum, Departmento Munitorum, and High Terran Civil Law. The court is outside of the remit and control of the sector lord or any other petty authority.Its halls, heavy in solemnity and ritual, process an endless stream of claim and counter-claim, lawsuits, actions, inquests, infractions, disputes of rights, and privileges. It disposes of great estates and rules on petty misdemeanours with equal gravitas and grinding implacability. It is a place where the flick of an auto-quill can raise up a pauper to governorship or condemn a world to starvation.Such is the size and complexity of the Chancellery Court's workings that a large district of Hive Gloriana on Solomon is given over to housing it and the infrastructure required to keep it working. Thousands of advocates, quastors, and prefects stalk its halls, whilst beneath them tens of thousands of scribes, notaries, clerks, runners, and menials endlessly toil.In theory, with the direct authority of the High Lords of Terra behind it, there is no greater temporal authority in the Calixis Sector. Even the office of the Calixian sector lord must obey the rulings of its highest court, the Consistorial Chamber, without question. In practice, however, the effect is somewhat different, as the whole system is soul-crushingly slow, pedantic, and obtuse to the point of insanity, with cases dragged out for standard years, solar decades, or even Terran centuries.As a rule, the more important the case, the longer will be spent on hearings, reflective recesses, counter-cases, and endless deliberation and ritual. Some petitioners simply die waiting for a judgement, their whole lives simply suspended in limbo while a court decides their fate. In some infamous cases, the proceedings have passed down through the generations.As might be imagined, such dreadful bureaucratic inertia often leads those who have the means to seek to accelerate the legal process or circumvent it entirely by unsavoury means. Certainly deception, bribery, coercion, assassination and mass murder are all tools to be used when trying to expedite a Chancellery case. Indeed, a twilight community of reclaimators, moneylenders, and information brokers has grown up in the Chancellery Court's long shadow.The Chancellery Court's judgements, though slow to conclude, can cause far greater strife than any single dispute or its consequences, as the ruling's power is absolute and enforceable by the harshest measures. Many such rulings are enacted without exception, even though the cause or need of them might have long ceased to be relevant.Fortunes are wiped out, populations uprooted, and innocents condemned for the crimes of their forebears -- their fate decided at the blow of a high jurist's gavel.