Xylum

Xylum was one of Captain Torr’s ranked men and Ashtara Walnut’s competitor for the place at his right hand. Where she brought the Ten Lashes protection, buyers and influence, he brought willingness: whatever Torr asked for, he would do. Ashtara’s own word for him, once she was selling the roster and had no reason left to be kind, was sycophant. He was standing beside Torr at the end.

He was taken alive at the auction camp southwest of Haudh-Gwenn, put down by Mikhail’s sleep spell and carried out with the rest of the prisoners (S1E10). He woke a day later on one hit point and was left sitting outside the room he was going to be questioned in, which was deliberate. Zahir, who had surrendered and turned, watched the party arrange it and told them Xylum was going to help them out a great deal, and meant the opposite.

The interrogation got nothing, and not by accident (S1E11). Koa opened by putting a crossbow bolt past his head, and Xylum answered with a position he never moved off: he would not talk to two men with no title, no land and no authority to promise him anything. Told that those two men had just brought down an operation that had run for years, he was unimpressed. He had done the arithmetic already and he said it out loud. Whatever he said and whatever he did, they were not going to let him walk away that day, so there was nothing in it for him. The most they could manage was to drag him in front of somebody worth talking to, and if that was what they wanted, they could take him there.

Koa set the crossbow aside and tried the other thing, which was to ask him what it had been like the first time he killed somebody. That landed. Xylum looked at him properly for the first time. Then he opened his mouth as though to answer, stepped to one side and drove himself forward with his hands still bound, meaning to break Koa’s nose with the crown of his head. He was watched the whole way in. Koa caught him by the collar, guided him onto a drawn shortsword and pushed it up until it was finished.

Koa killed him, defending himself, and it shook him badly enough that he handed off his weapons afterwards. On the road out of Harad, Mikhail told him plainly that a man who had got to his feet in that room would have run him through, and that there was no fault in any of it (S1E12).