Doctor Who: Independence Day by P. Darvill-Evans

Author:P. Darvill-Evans
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Science-Fiction:Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563538042
Publisher: BBC Worldwide Americas
Published: 2000-10-14T10:00:00+00:00

Therefore, although the overthrow of Vethran would be carried out by shock troops arriving directly from the space station, the attack would begin on land: a multiplicity of pincer movements, emerging from Kedin"s domains and striking into Gonfallon.

Madok was bringing the order of battle to the commander of Kedin"s household troops.

Jerrissar - the province, rather than the entire duchy on which its name had been conferred - was one of Kedin"s earliest territorial acquisitions. He had bought it, cheaply, from the old Count of Larriman, who had considered Jerrissar the least valuable of his lands, and who had then lived long enough to see Kedin and Tevana transform the province"s lower slopes into fertile terraces growing profitable crops of silk, tea and spore-seed.

Kedin"s motives in buying Jerrissar had not been entirely economic, however: the province straddled the equator, and provided Kedin with a domain that lay adjacent to Gonfallon and midway between his northern and southern estates. And while Jerrissar"s lower slopes could be made productive, the mountainous hinterland had the advantage of being impregnable.

On his infrequent visits to his least favourite domain, the Count of Larriman used to stay in the palace in Jerris, the province"s only large town. Kedin had other plans. He used explosives to blast a new road from Jerris into the mountains, and he appointed masons and engineers to rebuild and modernise the ruined fortress known as the Bridge.

Jerrissar was a province with its back to the sea. At its front, the mountains - often snow-capped despite their latitude - sloped relatively gently, down to Jerris and the fertile terraces, and then down again to the Tavent, the river that separated the province from Gonfallon. On the other side of the province, the mountains dropped precipitously, in vertical curtains of stone, to a narrow coastal strip. Here the inhabitants of a dozen villages, strung along the shore, made their living from fishing and remained almost unaware that they were part of Jerrissar. Only one track wound back and forth from this coast, up the steep cliffs, into the mountains and through a narrow defile between the highest peaks in the range.

From this pass the track continued, down slopes that were gentle only by comparison to those on the seaward side, to Jerris.

And at the highest point, on the levelled peaks of the twin spires of rock that formed the pass, in centuries past a lord of Jerrissar had built two fortresses. His successor, anxious to outdo his father"s monumental work of building, had had a wide stone bridge constructed to link the two forts. Hundreds of labourers, it was said, fell to their deaths on the road below during the building of the bridge. The newly-unified fortification took its name from its most notable feature. It proved costly to maintain and was abandoned within five years of being completed.

The Bridge was now Kedin"s communications centre. The new road, guarded by five strategically-placed forts between the Bridge and Jerris, provided rapid access by land to the main commercial route alongside the Tavent, and to Gonfallon.

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