Gargoth
The lash-bearing slaver who handed the crews their work, beheaded at the ruins within an hour of meeting the company
He came out of the ruins toward Aldo at an unhurried walk, slapping a spiked club into his open palm and taking care where the spikes were. Two more men closed in behind: one winding a chain around his wrist, one drawing a dagger. It had been a set-up from the start, and Aldo’s contact picked that moment to try to renegotiate the price upward.
The club was near enough a small morning star. He drove one of its spikes through Koa’s thigh and tore it back out, and nothing healed that leg for the rest of the night. Koa had been fighting to spare people up to then. He stopped, turned the sword in his hand, and took the head off in one swing, and came out of it drenched. The fourth slaver had been slowing to a stop and thinking about listening. He saw that, turned, and did not look back.
The forearm under the sleeve carried a single lash. Everything his crew did had come down through him, and by their own account he was the one who kept pushing them toward the slaving work when other work would have done. He answered to a boat captain, and above the boat captain Casper put people on the Haudh-Gwenn council.
He was also the road to Ashtara Walnut. Willie had asked him once about the beautiful red-haired woman, and Gargoth laughed and told him she was out of his league, and showed him the lash on his own arm to explain how he came to know her. Casper had known her for years as a good friend of Gargoth’s, old friends and perhaps once more than that, and had never suspected she was in the trade at all.
He was dead within an hour of meeting the company, and Aldo regretted it almost at once: he had beheaded the one man he most needed to question. Not long after, they were weighing whether one of them might put on his name and walk into the auction as the buyer in his place.
The name itself was a peculiarity. Idirans out of the up-region keep no set names and no family ones, a name being a thing a person takes from the ground they come from, and something as formal as Gargoth was remarked on as strange for a man in his line of work.