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The Archer was such a delicate painting. Darien smiled. It was an elegant weapon.
He’d never even seen the piece firsthand, but Clarissa had described it to him once, along with its colorful provenance. He’d striven to acquire the painting from the back room of a Shanghai salon. Now it was bound for New York, smuggled in a custom truss behind an airliner service panel. Darien opened a Victorian pocket watch and sighed. Two hours.
The Hip Sing would be furious when they found out the painting was here. Darien would leak the information soon enough. All the players would emerge and clamor for it, pull and trample one another down like crabs in a bucket. Then he’d thin the herd.
Darien polished his titanium helm, pausing to pick up a micro spanner and adjust the left optics bezel in the sharp light of a lone ceiling lamp. His warbled reflection played across the reflective skeletal face-plate. Yes, he’d heard the stories of the fabled painting. He was an experienced adept of yogic disciplines. He’d dabbled as an actor and with basic stage magic, cherishing the sleight of hand that came with it. He’d studied mnemonic methods learned from hermetic traditions; the medieval occultists, John Dee’s memory palaces, all of it derived from the sages of ancient Greece. He’d seen his share of wonders and psychic phenomena here and abroad, but in truth, Darien didn’t care if the Archer could actually come to life to do its master’s bidding. He just needed everyone else to believe it.
Darien spent the next hour going through what he called the praxis, a methodical regimen to prime body, mind, and spirit. He counted the minutes as he donned a black padded suit, fitted beneath with a web of wire-sheathed pulley cords and pneumatic tubes to hug his frame, moved by liquid counterweight and cell bladders to sense motion, react to impacts and adjust accordingly. He donned gloves over arm bracers and sheathed a pneumatic auto-pistol and a pair of telescoping truncheons. He turned to grab the silvery helm, sealing it within the rubber-lined collar ring of his armored jacket, boosting the oxygen level with the slightest hiss.
Darien closed his eyes and began a Pranayamic exercise called the Sword Breath technique, paring away doubts until his goal blazed perfectly in his mind. He looked to the mirror at the argent death’s head gleaming back at him from the darkness.
“Well, mighty Archer, prepare to meet the Silver Skull!”
