Queen of Mars - Book III in the Masters of Mars Trilogy by Al Sarrantonio Page B

for the brutes.
    Frane’s banner drew closer – and now I saw
what looked to be the fiend herself, her left arm raised high with
a sword, urging the Baldies onward, her helmet crimson in the
sun.
    The right arm was missing, and now I was sure
I had found my prize.
    For my father, and my grandmother before
her! I thought, my vision filling with blood lust.
    I spurred my horse on, riding through a sea
of crazed white bodies as if they were water parting before me.
    My prize drew closer – and now Frane’s head
turned to see me. Behind her, at the cliff’s edge, Baldies were
being pushed over into the nearly bottomless pit, flailing and
screaming as they fell. I saw a harlow, crazed and trapped by the
mass of bodies around it, hurl itself over the edge rather than be
hemmed in.
    Ahead of me, Frane turned, studying the
terrain behind her. She tried to move to the left but was blocked
by her own mad army, now being pushed in great numbers to the ledge
and over. To the right there was room where the harlow had been,
and she drove herself into the spot even as more Baldies filled
it.
    I drew closer, brandishing my sword, and
sought to meet her eye. Two Baldies, howling, jumped on my mare and
tried to scratch its eyes out. I dispatched them, left and right in
quick succession.
    Frane looked straight at me, even as I came
within hailing range.
    “Prepare to die, fiend!” I shouted, raising
my sword.
    Raising her own in mock salute, the one-armed
monster turned quickly –
    – and jumped into the chasm behind her,
followed by a score of white-bodied acolytes.
    “No!” I screamed, driving my mare to the
chasm’s edge and rearing it up. White bodies pressed around me and
I drove them off, down, hacked at them screaming, “It cannot end
like this!”
    The bodies thinned out around me, as others
of my army drove toward me, slaying Baldies in droves until their
numbers dwindled and then disappeared.
    I dismounted and stood panting, filled with
impotent rage, staring down at the immense pit gouged in the
surface of Mars, and the tiny unmoving white bodies littering its
bottom like specks of dust.
    I spied the single spot of red among them and
screamed in rage again.
    “My Queen,” General Reis addressed me, riding
up and quickly dismounting. He took my arm. “My Queen, please move
away from the edge of the chasm.”
    “She cheated me, even in death,” I spat.
    “She is dead, that is all that matters,” he
answered, trying to soothe me.
    I turned on him, fury in my eyes. “She
cheated me!”
    He drew back, perhaps alarmed at my rage.
Suddenly he bowed. “I will have her body brought up from the pit,”
he said.
    “Do that.” I rammed my sword viciously into
its scabbard, and strode past him to mount my horse and trot slowly
away, trying to calm my own ire.
    The sounds of battle had died around me,
leaving a field of white carnage and red blood. The moans of the
dying and wounded were like a judgment on me.
    Frane is dead , I thought.
    The architect of so much unhappiness on my
world, the murderer of my father, the sworn enemy of my
grandmother, had been vanquished, and was no more.
    Now there would be true peace on the
planet.
    Why did I feel so empty, so unsatisfied?
    It had all seemed almost too easy – was that
it?
    Yes...something was wrong, out of place.
    What was it?
    Later that day I was to find out just how
wrong things were.
     

Eleven
    T he body had been
too short. I’m sure that had been in the back of my mind, even
during the battle. It was not a F’rar body, and not Baldy, but of
some indeterminate clan, possibly from the far north.
    “Perhaps a follower she picked up on her
flight,” General Reis said. “She was bound to have a few fanatics
still close to her.”
    “But how many?” I asked.
    On the slab before me, stripped of its armor
and helmet, the body looked little like Frane. The missing left
arm, hacked off at the shoulder, was the most telling part of its
bodily disguise.
    “Do you