Nearly every single main villain in the Redwall series is like this (some minor villains are too). And with 22 books, there's a lot of them to go over.
In the first book, we have Cluny the Scourge, the Big Bad rat warlord who is a complete sociopath and enjoys killing anyone and anything, sometimes even eating them. Most of the time, he treats his mooks like dirt, especially showcased at the very beginning of the book, when he orders one of his henchrats to get the horse that's driving his army's cart to move faster. The mook succeeds, but then falls to his death, being crushed under the wheels of said cart. Cluny laughs as the mook dies and says "Tell the devil that Cluny sent you, Skullface!" This is even brought Up to Eleven in the graphic novel when he continues with "Tell him I've come to Mossflower and it's precious Abbey, to do his work!" This basically sums up that fact that Cluny is indeed like a demon in the form of a rat. And that is just the beginning of the book. After much killing, manipulating, and torturing on his part, at the end of the book, his troops capture a peaceful family of dormice. Cluny then orders the father mouse to sneak inside Redwall and open the gates for his horde, or else the mouse's family (including a baby) would die (and knowing Cluny, it would probably be a horrible death). When the dormouse tearfully complies and opens the gate, Cluny has him nearly killed.
The second book, Mossflower, features Queen Tsarmina, who begins by murdering her father and framing her good-at-heart brother for it, sentencing him to life imprisonment in the dungeons of her Castle Kotir. Tsarmina then becomes a totally ruthless tyrant, exacting her power over her rebel "subjects", the woodlanders, by sending a giant, mindless, and bloodcrazed rat-monster-thing to attack the woodlanders and slaughter them. And while the monster is killed before it can do this, it's painful to imagine what it might have done had Stormfin not been there. And like many other villains, she treats her mooks horribly, forcing her partially lame advisor to hobble ahead of her marching troops and avoid being trampled. For about an hour. In the hot sun. He barely comes out of it alive. (Needless to say, he pulls a Screw This, I'm Outta Here later on.) Worse still, when provided means of escaping from a practically certain death by her only underling that ever seemed genuinely loyal (and just proved that he was), she immediately leaves him to perish, just because that spared her some extra risk. Not to mention the fact that she basically drove the entire kingdom into poverty by demanding pretty much everything the citizenry had, and then doesn't care when her troops start complaining about having nothing to eat.
In Salamandastron, we have Ferahgo the Assassin. The weasel starts his career by coldly murdering the parents of two infant badgers after making a faux peace treaty with them. Then, when one of his mooks suggests killing the babies, Ferahgo decides to just let the winter weather finish them off. Yep. He just sentenced two newborns to die slowly of starvation and the elements instead of killing them outright. And that's when he was a teenager. Later, when he becomes a fully-fledged warlord, he wears a kilt made of animal furs. In a world populated by anthropomorphic animals. That's the equivalent of a human wearing other humans' skin as clothing (aka Leatherface). To solidify this, he has a knife dubbed "The Skinner" and often threatens his henchmen with skinning them alive, something he actually does in the book, albeit offscreen. And he does it all with a charming smile on his face.
Badrang the Tyrant from Martin the Warrior is a great example. First off, he rules a fortress run by slaves, whom he treats cruelly. His mooks don't get much better treatment, as summed up by Skalrag's fate: after carrying out Badrang's orders to burn down his Affably Evil rival's pirate ship, said rival captures Skalrag, and, instead of killing him himself, sends him back to Badrang, who then proceeds to put the poor fox on the torture rack before tying him to the gates and having him shot full of arrows. And it seems that he did this just because he was pissed off at his rival. Then later, a band of traveling circus players came to the fortress to distract the vermin troops so that the slaves could escape. One act involved a pretty young squirrelmaiden going to be "sacrificed" by a (collapsible) dagger. When the ringmaster hare asked the audience if he should kill the squirrelmaid, none of the normally bloodthirsty vermin spoke up. Except, of course, Badrang, who casually growls, "Run her through rabbit, and get on with it." And of course, the infamous ending, where Badrang brutally kills The Hero's girlfriend by breaking her neck against a wall, pretty much only because she was in his way. He's probably one of the most hated villains in the series.
Another obvious example is the very, very Ax Crazy wolverine warlord, Gulo the Savage. He murders his father and then becomes obsessed with killing his brother so that he can get the MacGuffin. Following his brother across the sea to Mossflower, he wreaks havoc in the land, butchering anyone he comes across. And eating them, as both he and his entire horde are cannibals. His list of victims include several hares that were on their way to deliver a gift to Redwall Abbey, a tribe of river rats, and more than twenty squirrels who were doing a parade. And as a present for their friends and family, he leaves their mangled heads behind. Some of these victims were eaten alive, too. Basically, Gulo is a completely insane and sadistic brute who lives to kill and enjoys every bit of it.
Outcast of Redwall has Swartt Sixclaw, who is probably one of the most sadistic Redwall villains and who pretty much hated everybody. He did get married, but it was only because of tradition that he inherited the previous warlord's daughter as his wife, and he pretty much ignored her all the time. When she died giving birth to his son, he blew it off as nothing and even left the infant ferret to die on a battlefield. (It didn't.) Swartt kept the hero of the book, Sunflash the Mace, as an abused slave for a time, and when he assembles a massive horde, he's known for backstabbing his allies when they outlive their usefulness. He deals with possible sedition in his horde by having the flunky of the ringleader force feed him an entire crow...then has the flunky killed for 'murdering an officer'. It earns him the name 'The Pitiless One'.
Gabool the Wild, the king of the Searat Empire of Terramort. Gabool has a bellmaker and his daughter captured so the bellmaker will build him a tower for his prized bell. He keeps and mistreats the daughter as a slave, and when she manages to nearly kill him, he has her thrown into the seas. He then manipulates her father into thinking she's alive before losing patience and throwing him in as well. Throughout the book, Gabool's sanity slowly slips away more and more and he begins killing minions for little to no rational reason. More of his crimes are offscreen, but from what we're told, he's got a ton of them under his belt.
Special mention has to go to Vilu Daskar from The Legend of Luke. In the beginning of Luke's tale, he and his crew slaughter Luke's tribe "for fun", Vilu personally cutting down his wife, Sayna. When he spies Luke and his crew following him on a ship, rather than ram the Goreleech into his enemy's much smaller vessel like Akkla suggests, he says he'll wait until the mice work and sweat to fix the ship anew...then he'll swoop in and sink it, taking the survivors as slaves. When he gets new slaves on his ship, Vilu finds the sickest and weakest by making them pull the log; those who can't are "given" their freedom and forced to walk the plank. (As one slave - whose father couldn't haul the log - says, "If'n the big fishes don't get 'em, the sea does.") His crew is treated little better: when some pirates are found guilty of theft, Vilu has them savagely beaten and hung from sunrise to sunset with sea water poured into their wounds. And it turns out he had been even worse than we knew. One of the pirates recalled a past incident when Vilu dealt with four hedgehogs who hid some sacks of grain. Vilu promised to set them free if they reveal where their harvest is hidden, and when they did so, he had the four creatures sewed up in those same sacks, along with heavy rocks, then tossed overboard, saying, "You leave my ship alive, free to go where you will!" The fact he does all of this with a general casualness and utter disregard for life, despite his Victorian manner and eloquence, puts him at the top of the bottom. All you need to know about Vilu can be summed up in one line: "I do my best to be the worst."
Other villains worth mentioning are: Emperor Ublaz, who sanctioned the massacre of an entire clan of otters just to obtain a few pearls that they had; Ungatt Trunn, who is basically the Hitler of the Redwall universe; Vilaya the Sable Quean, who, like Slagar, Would (and did) Kill A Child; Vilaya's Blood Knight general, Zwilt the Shade, who enjoys torturing his victims before killing them; Genral Ironbeak, who is not above casually tossing a baby off a roof; Baliss the Slayer, who claims that he can and is willing to make someone's dying last a whole season; and, in the newest and final book, The Rogue Crew, there's Razzid Wearat, who is possibly the most despicable evil-doer in the entire series. He tortures innocents for fun, casually kills his mooks whenever he wants, and apparently eats children. It's no wonder that the titular heroes of the book are Sociopathic Heroes.
This page has not been indexed. Please choose a satisfying and delicious index page to put it on.