The most remarkable thing about Fuentes was not his genius at innovative goetic summoning, the likes of which the world had never seen and with luck will never see again. While formidable, his genius was not immediately apparent, because the work was dense and difficult and could only be truly appreciated by another expert in the field. No, the most striking thing about him was his size. Fuentes was larger than life. He was more than thirty feet tall. His hands alone were so enormous that he could have folded his palm over my head and picked me up by it. Of course, he never would have done that, because it would have killed me, and worse, shown me up in front of our colleagues, and Fuentes held fast to our united front. We were two of a kind, most unlike, of course, in our relative sizes, but as far as the other members of the Royal Goetia Society were concerned, quite like enough.
I fear I have given perhaps a misleading impression with such a flippantly violent hypothetical. In truth, Fuentes was an exceedingly gentle and self-conscious person who would not have even accidentally squished any person’s skull. He also preferred not to discuss his size in any way. Or perhaps this preference was thrust upon him. Meetings of the Royal Goetia Society were characterized by a polite, resounding non-acknowledgement that there was any difference in his size, just as it was with our colour. The idea was, as I understood it, to create equality by erasing difference. No matter where we were from, no matter our colour or racial heritage, the Society believed we were all the same under the skin, equal supplicants at the dread altar of goetic science. Of course, the rest of them were all Albionese.
At our meetings, our differences profoundly absent, members would not crane their heads to look Fuentes in the eye, any more than they would engage me in casual conversation, rather than speaking distantly of me to me, as if I were a postal service to myself, as if my face was merely the consul for the foreign land that lay behind my eyes. As for Fuentes, people typically addressed remarks to his shin, or rather to the vast swathe of cloth that covered it in the searingly bright colours that Fuentes favoured, always smooth and uncreased. No member of the RGS, not even myself, ever asked Fuentes how he pressed his trousers. Obviously, there were no kerosene or charcoal flatirons manufactured to a scale that he could actually use—and imagine the uncontrollable heat such a thing would generate! They, we, did discuss such things sometimes, away from Fuentes. Our curiosity was insatiable. There seemed to be only one logical explanation for the many ways in which Fuentes smoothed the impracticalities of daily life that he must face, i.e. demons.
The summoning of demons (preferably invisible, because of their legendary ugliness) to perform labour was, of course, the raison d’être of the Society, the axle of our great industrial world-society, and the reason Fuentes and I had been granted access to this most privileged of worlds.
The Society’s membership was to be composed of the most skilled and celebrated goetic summoners in the Imperium, and of late this membership had been opened up, quite unexpectedly, to allow applications from talented native summoners from the dominions. It was rumoured that a new liberal tendency had taken power in the Society’s uppermost echelon, the secretive council known as the Daktyloi Idaioi.
This liberalisation is how I, and soon after Fuentes, came to join the Society. We were among the first such applicants, and among very few who were accepted as provisional aspirant members. There was an asterisk next to each of our names in the Register of the Society, and when I signed it, I checked at the bottom of the page, the back of the book, flipped through the pages, imagining somehow that the asterisk pointed somewhere, that it referred to something, a note, perhaps, qualifying our membership, or recording the new and peculiar circumstances of our joining. But there was no such note. Or rather, Fuentes said much later when I remarked on it, an actual note was superfluous, given that everyone in the Society, including us, was perfectly aware of what such a note would say if it existed. The note, he said, was immanent. The world was the note. He was given to such flourishes of rhetoric. What nonsense, I said. They probably just marked us down to make us pay a higher membership fee every year.
In fact, the liberalisation of membership in the Society, opening it up to goetic summoners from everywhere in the Imperium, was only logical since in fact this was the very purpose of Great Albion’s empire-building in the first place. All the world knew that Albion had long since dug too deep into its own hell, driven it close to its final exhaustion, almost dry and forlorn of demons. What demon reserves that Albion still possessed in its own spiritual territories had long been reserved for military purposes, powering their conquest of lands near and far across the globe. Conquest bred new dominions, and dominions came with new hells of their own which could be tapped, their demons drained out, new forms of goetic labour enabled by adapting native techniques of summoning—and improving them, of course, with the organized application of rational engineering and scientific management. In this way was the Imperium built, and so it became the mightiest force on Earth, holding the leash on legions of divers demons, the subhuman nightmares of a hundred kingdoms and a thousand races.
I qualified for Society membership with my thesis on the binding and industrialization of the traditional healing goetia of my homeland—to scientifically isolate, distribute and parallelize the effective components from my ancestors’ tired, time-consuming rituals beseeching demons to eradicate germs, infections, and pathogens from the body, to design a streamlined, effective goetic system for the subtle manipulation of the body’s animalcules. I hoped to one day revolutionize the world’s healthcare, still overstrained from the Imperium’s operations of pacification. This was my proposal to the Daktyloi, and for a while they seemed to look on it, and me, with favour.
But my project was delayed and eventually side-lined, shelved—because Fuentes joined soon after I did, a giant both literally and figuratively in our shared science, to much greater interest from the RGS at large and the Daktyloi in particular. He told casual questioners in the Society that he was but a member of a whole tribe of people who looked just like him, a race of thirty-foot-tall humans who lived in the Cordillera de los Andes. This suited the racial theories then and still popular in the Imperium—Lemurians to the southeast, Vril-ya below, and did not Philostratus find the skeleton of a giant 22 cubits high at Sigeus?—so most took it at face value.
His thesis and his project were declared highly confidential by the Daktyloi. But I was his friend, together we were a united front against the rest of them; I asked him and promised to keep it secret, so he gave me a copy. Once I had struggled through that profoundly complex text, I understood why Fuentes was so prized. He was not a natural giant; he was a human, once of ordinary size, who had not only used goetic labour to transform himself, but applied it constantly to sustain that transformation. He was both pioneer and proof of concept of a highly efficient method of gigantification. To the Daktyloi, he represented the possibility that they, their elites and armies could at will, through the husbandry of bound subhuman labour to embiggen and uphold them, walk the earth as invincible superhuman giants.
I found that thought terrifying, though I struggled to articulate precisely why. I dreamed of great hands, suffered nightmares at night, and bolts of panic in the days. Their hands—their hands. I could not speak of it.
Fuentes and I were friends, of course. Were we not two of a kind, risen together? We met often, to talk of inconsequential things and take walks out in the city. The chill of this country troubles me still, but walking next to Fuentes was like being near a furnace. Over the weeks, as stealthily and subtly as I could, I engaged my own skills to invisibly strip the healthy bacteria from his guts, a little at a time. When he sickened and died, seemingly from inexplicable biological complications from his own gigantification, the Daktyloi shelved his project and moved on to, no doubt, worse. I still have the nightmares, but when I wake up, lips tight, with tears on my cheeks and the ache in my heart, I’m not sure what I weep for.
© 2023 Vajra Chandrasekera
