Free And They Called Her Spider (Galvanic Century) by Michael Coorlim

 
    "She moves, at times, with the fluid grace particular to acrobats and dancers, and at others her motions are sudden and jerky, feral and darting. A birdlike tilt of the head, an abrupt twist of the spine; that's all the warning given before she changes, transforming from entertainer to killer, from elegant to lethal. My pet theory is that when she becomes the perfect assassin she gains a new awareness of time and kinetics, her movements so graceful and quick that the human mind can only process them in sudden still images, like the frames of a zoetrope. Mere words can barely suffice to convey the purity of her motion. I have to think of her in alchemical terms. She's quicksilver."
    Bartleby strode the perimeter of my workshop as he spoke, quartz knob on the end of his walking stick clacking a steady metronome beat against brass fittings set into the walls. He did it to irritate me, of that I'm sure; both the tapping and the purple-prose drenched answer to the simple question I'd put to him.
    "That's all well and good. But who is she?" I asked.
    He turned away, cane rattling along the baluster of the staircase leading up to the rest of our townhouse. "I swear, James, if you'd spend less time down here and more at the club with me, you'd know what was going on in London. The social season doesn't last forever, you know, and people find you odd enough as it is."
    "I've little regard for the opinions of toffs or the clubs they inhabit."
    "But they're so useful, James!"
    "Then save your patter for the swells. Just tell me who this 'Spider' woman is."
    "Nobody knows, and that's the thrill of it. She comes out of nowhere, a flash of red and black fabric, powdered white face, the tinkling of bells, drawing near in that sinuous way she has, mesmerising and captivating even those with the presence of mind to recognise her as a threat. What else is one to do but watch when presented with a beautiful spectre of death? When I saw her, at first it was the sheer oddness of the sight that stayed my hand: a small girl, slender of frame and fine of feature, dressed as a jester. She entered the airship impossibly, through a port window a thousand feet up--"
    "A thousand? Airships cruise at four or five-hundred, maximum."
    "--a thousand feet up, to dance and pirouette through the crowd with precision and aplomb, and then someone was dead."
    "So what you're saying is that this woman killed someone while you stood and stared, slack jawed?"
    I hefted a long slender blade, a weapon purported to belong to the assassin herself. It -- along with the rest of the artifacts littering my workbench -- made up the sum product of Scotland Yard's investigations thus far. With the Queen's Platinum Jubilee but days away, they'd resorted to commissioning our services as consulting detectives. There were older agencies, larger ones, and many with a better reputation, but Bartleby and I had some small name for handling the more outlandish and sensitive matters.
    "That's not what I'm saying at all," Bartleby stopped, settling into a relaxed stance. "She danced, and then the American industrialist sponsoring the gallery flight was dead. I was watching... we were all watching her, but she barely approached the man. She went from her smooth acrobatic dancing to a jerkier sort of movement. She... I swear... seemed to flicker for a moment, and her target collapsed."
    "You didn't actually see her cut him."
    "Nobody did. Just like her prior victim and the ones before that. When we landed the airfield physician gave the same diagnosis -- poor bastard had been neatly eviscerated."
    I later learnt that it had been the cleanliness of her cuts that had given cause to the broadsheet's efforts to link her to the Ripper, one even going so far as to label her "Jack's Daughter" before some other publication started calling her "The Spider." Lord only knew why that name stuck when the half-dozen others put forth fell by the wayside.
    "I'm honestly just grateful for the opportunity