Tara of Helium, the Warlord's beautiful and spirited daughter, is carried away by the vast winds of a violent Martian Storm. Tara brings her small one-man flyer down safely enough, but she is stranded in a strange part of Barsoom, where magnificent rykors-headless bodies work like cattle at the mercy of their pitiless masters, the kaldanes-creatures which are all head and no body. And this is not all, for in trying to escape from the Kaldanes Tara is captured by the city of Manator where she becomes the prize in the Martian game of chess, jetan-played with living pieces-and played to the death