On through the night the bombardment continued, but it wasn't until an hour before dawn that the walls at the focus of their bombardment began to crumble. The wall may no longer be a match for the technology of the day, but it had been built thick and it was taking longer than I had thought to chew through it.
I revised my time table of their breakthrough upwards into the afternoon. The town was rigged and ready for its final service to the Valley Lands. The soldiers left in the town were getting as much rest as possible, but it was hard given the constant pounding taking place. The site of the great wall crumbling downward didn't help the morale of the army either.
According to plan General Santaran had moved off in the night with his allotted share of the army to await the part of the plan that applied to him. The morning stretched onward slowly until it was finally noon. Dark storm clouds moved in and I prayed that it wouldn't rain.
The invasion would begin soon, as I didn't think that they could take the walls down much further than the two wide gaping holes that they had already punched through it. The talus slopes of pulverized rock that had formed on either side of the wall shielded the lower section of the wall from direct bombardment.
The barrage stopped close to five o'clock. They would come at us with infantry first, because the steepness of the rubble slopes was too great of an angle upward on their side and downward on our side to successfully navigate with cavalry. The wall was still roughly thirty to forty feet off the flat plain of the pass's floor. The objective of the infantry would be to first secure the two tunnel gates to either side of the pass and open them to bring their cavalry to bear against us.
That wouldn't be such an easy task though. Our warriors had worked all night long and into the morning filling the gate tunnels with the fallen stone from off the wall ramparts above. It would take them a while to work at unloading the rock just as it had taken us a lot of time to put it there.
The drums started up signaling their advance. I turned to General Sanjo who stood beside me and offered my hand, "Good luck General. Don't stay to long in your defense position."
He nodded and started forward toward the line of archers. "General?" he looked back, "I know how much you want to keep the enemy from this city, but all you are to do is to allay their suspicion of another trap. Not to fight and die to the last man before the remnants of our ancestor's shattered wall."