“Beware the dark genius of the Sombrus Tower,
which stands in the desert on the sun’s left hand.”

The stories you never forget are the ones that really move you. Sword-and-sorcery began as an offshoot of weird fiction, but too often in modern S&S the weirdness is minimized or entirely missing. It takes more than traditional supernatural tropes like magic and monsters to create a truly weird experience—to weave a spell of words that fascinates and mystifies the reader. Such is the case with Tanith Lee’s “The Sombrus Tower,” first published in Lin Carter’s Weird Tales #2 in 1981. Here is a knight’s tale that really brings the weird.

In a mere 4,000 words “Sombrus” delivers a powerful and surreal narrative within the context of a sword-and-sorcery framework. I am thrilled to see it appear in DMR’s upcoming Tanith Lee collection The Empress of Dreams, because it’s one of the most beautiful and haunting stories you will find in any genre. Read it ten times and you’ll still be as “weirded out” as you were the first time. It’s a bit like a Zen koan—a riddle whose only answer is a paradox. If David Lynch or Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote sword-and-sorcery, the result would probably be a lot like this story. Some critics might dismiss it as an experiment in “magical realism,” but that term fails to capture how deep into the weirdness this story goes. 

“The Sombrus Tower” is weird fantasy at its most powerful with a genuine emphasis on the weird: the unexplainable, the ineffable, that which cannot be understood. Lee’s hypnotic narrative focuses on strangeness and mood rather than swordplay, creating a surreal and gradual descent into mystery. Daughter of the Night.com summarizes the tale like this: “Vesontane rides through the Southern Waste; his destination the Tower Sombrus, which always seems to remain the same distance away.” It is the story of a fearless knight searching for that which can never be found. In this way it parallels somewhat the legend of The Holy Grail, an important part of the King Arthur mythology, but Vesontane’s witch-haunted world is not the Arthurian world. The Tower Sombrus is far more an idea than a physical construct. Or perhaps it is the imperishable ghost of an idea. An existential paradox, a space/time mirage, and a doom beyond the understanding of men.

I first discovered this legendary tale in Marvin Kaye’s anthology Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies circa 1989. I was in college at the time, really digging my Creative Writing classes and discovering the new Terminus version of Weird Tales. So many great stories in Kaye’s anthology, but “The Sombrus Tower” was the one that made me an instant Tanith Lee fan. It was my gateway drug to her incredible body of work, and I was addicted. I still am. “Sombrus” led me directly to her Tales from the Flat Earth novels, which are still my favorites. From that time on I looked for Tanith Lee in every bookstore I could find. It’s not often that reading one story can change the direction of your life, but Tanith’s magic was strong.

What I didn’t know at the time is that “The Sombrus Tower” was inspired by another Tanith Lee story published five years earlier called “The Demoness.” It debuted in Lin Carter’s Year’s Best Fantasy Stories #2 at a time when Tanith’s first major novel (The Birthgrave) was getting a lot of attention. “Sombrus” was her second visit to the realm of Krennok-dol, yet these two stories exist completely independent of each other. I didn’t read “Demoness” until many years after reading “Sombrus,” and I didn’t realize the connection between the two stories until much later. When DMR releases Empress of Dreams in February, both stories will appear back-to-back under the same cover for the first time ever, along with fourteen other Tanith Lee gems.

Vesontane’s tale begins when five sister-witches arrive at the castle of Krennok-dol to dispense prophecies of doom. The king’s knights ride out soon after, most of them seeking to avoid the dark fates foretold to them. Yet two of these warriors, Golbrant and Vesontane, are brave enough—or perhaps foolish enough—to ride toward their given dooms instead of away from them. While Golbrant rides off to the sea (as chronicled five years earlier in “The Demoness”), “Sombrus” follows Vesontane into the cold Southern Waste.

In the desert he meets a series of phantoms who tell him about the nature of the Tower Sombrus. Like a “dark needle” it stands always at the rim of his sight, but no matter how far he rides he never gets any closer to it. Lee’s lyrical language seduces the reader as the spell of the distant tower seduces Vesontane, drawing both toward a place of ultimate mystery. The point of any quest is to fulfill the quest. So the quest that can neither be fulfilled nor abandoned must be a kind of purgatory, if not Hell itself. “The Sombrus Tower” achieves a nightmarish quality in its final pages as the reader travels with Vesontane into the depths of the inexplicable. If you’ve ever had a dream where you were stuck running in slow motion or trying to grab something that was forever out of reach, you might recognize those sensations as you finish this tale. 

There is also plenty of erotic symbology here: Vesontane is a classic alpha male doomed by feminine sorcery, lost in the thrall of a gigantic phallic symbol. Whereas “The Demoness” explores the damnation of surrendering to carnal lust, the curse of the Tower Sombrus seems to be eternal desire without fulfillment. The first story features a supernatural entity in the form of a woman whose love brings death to any man who invades her lonely white tower. “Sombrus” is the other side of that coin: A supernatural entity inside a lonely black tower that is impossible to invade because it can never be reached—only glimpsed from afar.

Let us not forget that the knights of old were supposed to remain chaste and pure of heart. Tanith always loved to challenge that idea by showing the tarnished humanity beneath the splendid armor and shields. Vesontane’s carnal infidelities come back to haunt him in the shadow of the Tower Sombrus. It is a story of transfiguration and annihilation, and possibly a statement on the duality of human existence. You don’t have to think too hard about all of this to enjoy the story, but it will probably keep you thinking long after you finish it. In fact, it might just haunt you the way the tower haunted Vesontane, the way the Grail haunted Percival, the way the green light haunted Gatsby.

The closer you get, the further away you are.  

Tanith wrote “The Sombrus Tower” soon after winning the British Fantasy Award for her 1979 novel Death’s Master. She was at the height of her creative power during this stage of her career, and this story is a prime example of that power unleashed. A “somnambulist” is a sleepwalker, someone caught in the grip of a dream, but whose body keeps on moving in the physical world. Considering its title, “Sombrus” could be a warning against sleepwalking your life away by chasing an unobtainable goal. Could this be the ultimate fate of mankind? To search desperately for meaning in a universe that has no objective meaning to offer?

Maybe it’s a story about how stubborn and prideful humans can be, and how the universe humbles those who assign themselves too much significance. Perhaps it’s a reminder that desire itself is the cause of all suffering. Maybe it’s a warning not to mess with powerful women because Hell hath no fury like five sister-witches scorned. It could be all of these things or none of them. It really depends on who reads the story. The weird cannot be explained, it can only be experienced. And perhaps that is the whole point of it.  

So is “The Sombrus Tower” a tale of sword-and-sorcery? Dark fantasy? Weird fiction? It doesn’t really matter. “Genre categories are irrelevant,” Tanith Lee told Tabula Rasa in 1994. “Writing is writing and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?” One thing is for sure: This story is a brilliant reminder that the sword-and-sorcery genre grew directly from the tradition of weird fiction.

Let’s keep it weird.