I was sent sprawling to the soft sward by what felt like a small flier crashing into my back. I rolled instinctively to fend off the airborne attacker. What I saw sent a shudder down my aching spine.

A sith hovered above me, its bulbous body held impossibly aloft by tiny, whirring wings of gossamer. It had not struck with its powerful stinger, else I'd have been dead. More likely, I had simply been an obstacle in its path, and the thing crashed into me with its hideous head. It floated there, shaking that head as if to clear it, and then darted upward and was gone.

John Carter has told me the closest earthly equivalent to this Barsoomian creature is miniscule: no larger than a man's thumb. "Hornet," he called it. Imagine, if you can, a hornet grown to the size of yonder writing desk, with ferocious jaws and myriad facet eyes that cover three-quarters of its head. And behind is the poisonous stinger, powerful enough to impale a thoat. Bloodthirsty things, these siths were in days gone by. I knew of entire cities that had been laid to waste by sith swarms.

Now, I was at the center of one such swarm. There were hundreds of the flying beasts; dodging amongst the trees and about the small clearing. The roar of their madly buzzing wings was overpowering. Their jaws opened and shut incessantly, with an unnerving click-click-click.

I saw no sign of Thuvan Dihn. Perhaps he'd made it to safety beneath a tree. Or, more probably, he'd been carried off to his doom. The sky was black, a plague of the ungodly huge insects. I held out little hope that my companion could have survived the assault; nor did I delude myself about my own fate.

The last I saw of The Killer, he was clinging to the monstrous head of a sith, tusks gouging the bloody mass as the beast ascended higher and higher above the trees.

I drew my sword and managed to stumble to my feet — only to be nearly beheaded by another flashing monster.

But as I spun to the side, I saw it was no sith that had shot past my head. It was a man, on some strangely designed flier. The sleek machine tore past so quickly that I caught barely a glimpse of it. Then it was gone, in hot pursuit of a fleeing sith that had raced between the boles of two trees at the other end of the clearing.

More of the flying machines were engaged in battle with the swarm. The armor-clad riders straddled their narrow craft like they would a thoat, bent forward against the wind as they grasped the low-slung handlebars with which they apparently controlled the odd fliers. As others darted into the clearing, I saw that from the prow of the vehicles protuded 10-foot lances, which could be extended or retracted at the will of the operator. The fliers maneuvered uncannily among the trees, and, diving upon their prey, extended a poison-tipped lance and drove it unmercifully into flesh. For a moment, the machine would be wrenched violently as the dying beast shuddered in its death throes. Then the operator would retract the lance and be off in pursuit of another sith — that is, if he hadn't been thrown from his mount by the initial jolt.

The fliers were also equipped with radium rifles. Exploding pellets peppered the clearing. Here, a tree would burst into flame. There, a crater would be exposed in a shower of soil.

I dove for cover.

The guns seemed not as accurate against the siths as the lances, which I later learned were dipped in the sith’s own poison; the only concoction deadly enough to be effective against the beasts. It was these that the flying hunters used most often to devastating effect.

Nor were the siths ineffective against their attackers. I saw one of the beasts dive unerringly upon a hapless hunter, driving its stinger through his armored back so that it protuded from a lifeless chest. Lifting the body from the flier, the sith rose above the trees and was gone. The riderless flier crashed into a tree and exploded.

I had little time to observe the unusual tactics of this strange battle, for I was occupied with battles of my own. I'd never before fought a sith, but it soon became apparent that disabling the stinger was the first rule of such combat. As one of the beasts dove toward me, its midsection bent forward so that the deadly organ was poised to strike, I swung a mighty cut and managed to sever the menace near its base.

The creature screamed in rage and pain, but did not appear mortally wounded. It altered its course, looping above me. Then it bolted downward again, clutching my shoulders in pawlike appendages on a pair of its legs. I was lofted high above the glade, dangling helplessly in the clutches of the fearsome beast. It pummeled my body with the stump where its stinger had been; I was like to have been turned to jelly by the merciless pounding if it continued for much longer.

The ride itself was a dizzying, stomach-churning spectacle, as we darted amongst the trees and raced crazily this way and that. At one point, a flying warrior charged my sith, intent on lancing it. I think it mattered little to him that I was wriggling in the creature's grasp. The warrior must have given me up for dead -- or else he just didn't care, figuring my own death a fair price if the world was rid of one more sith. It seemed, to me, a rather high price for another to pay.

But a sideways dash by the monster sent the warrior crashing into the trunk of a mighty tree.

Then the beast darted upward, carrying me off to some fate I could not imagine. We were airborne for at least a zode.

The blows from the stump became less frequent. I let my body go limp in the beast's grasp, to make it believe I had succumbed to its attack. Then the beating stopped and we began to sink lower in the thin air.

It was becoming obvious that the sith was badly wounded, either from my own blows or as a result of its battle with the strange fliers. By its haphazard pattern, I guessed that the creature was off its course -- lost.

Eventually, the sith faltered, swooping ever lower to the ground. We were entering a jungle-like area that could only be the Great Toonolian Marsh.

With a heaving convulsion, the sith crashed down through the thick foliage. I leapt clear of its body, and turned hastily to defend myself against its death throes. But the beast was no more. I turned away from it, and decided to continue on, alone, toward Toonol — wherever that might be.

Neither Thuria nor Cluros had yet risen, though I knew they both would ere many more xats passed. For now, the forest was blanketed in Koradian darkness. Monstrous shapes grew all around me in this dismal wood. The dank smell of rotting vegetation permeated everything.

As I clawed my way through the clinging undergrowth, cutting a path through the hanging vines with upraised sword, a rythmic sound, from afar, came softly to my ears. At first, it was barely audible above the buzzing insects, hissing serpents and roaring night-carnivores that surrounded me — whose constant din I had become accustomed to as I slashed my way through blackness.

But this new sound was like none other I'd heard in the Great Marsh, for it was unmistakably produced by a human; as weird and otherworldy as the sound itself was to my ears, my intellect told me no savage beast could make it. There was a cadence to the sound; a beat that suggested purpose, and hypnotic in its way. Its faint, yet steady tone in that eerily black night might have unnerved me, had I been other than a prince of Helium. Even so, I lent more caution to my advance through the wood, straining every sense forward in an attempt to discern the sound's exact location.

Soon, a dull glow became apparent in the distance, as if cast by a campfire. And to the beating-drum sound was added a sing- song chant, mournful and primitive — a single voice, that of a woman. It spoke to a primal instinct inside me; I felt stirrings that reached back into my being to ancestors who danced by firelight, naked and painted, when the world was young — before the Orovars; perhaps in the shadow of the Tree of Life itself.

I crept forward through that black wood, expecting nothing because my mind could conjure no possible scene to accompany that alluring, yet somehow disturbing sound. As I drew closer, ever silent, the firelight cast weird and flickering shadows upon the trees all about me. The growls and moans of predators seemed to have subsided, and the chant grew more pressing in my ears.

Silently pulling back a rotted branch, I saw an open glade, bathed in the glow of a roaring fire at its center. Around the fire danced a naked red girl, as beautiful as any I'd ever laid eyes upon. And yet, she was strange to my eyes. Her jet-black hair was straight as the edge of a sword — unlike the flowing, soft curls of other red women — and tied back by a leather strip across her brow. She wore knee-high boots, made of the same material. Attached to a single thong about her slim waist was a small pouch, covered in beads which were arranged in a mysterious pattern. As she chanted her mournful song, the girl tapped softly on the hide of a banth, stretched taughtly upon a wooden hoop.

But her dance! That was the strangest aspect of the bizzare scene. She leaped high into the air with every bound, twenty feet or more, landing gracefully in the soft soil of the marsh. Again and again she made the great leaps, gently keeping time upon the primitive drum and by the unintelligible words of her song.

I crouched, spellbound, behind the trees. I had never seen the like of it. The twin moons of Barsoom rose now, casting their light upon the spectacle. The girl's leaps grew even greater, and she shuddered in a kind of ecstasy that seemed almost religious.

I had little time to marvel. From the brush at the opposite end of the glade, three towering green men rushed upon the tableau as the girl was at the apex of one of her mighty bounds. She saw them from the height of her leap and, dropping the drum, withdrew a slim dagger from the thong at her hip. She landed full on the chest of the leader, plunging her blade deep into his eye.

By the next moment, I, too, had leaped into the clearing with drawn sword.