The Crippled God (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #10)

by Steven Erikson

Karsa now understood that god. The times that he had been chained, he had felt that terrible panic, that animal frenzy to escape. No mortal, human or Toblakai, should ever feel such feelings. Nor, he knew now, should a god. ‘He cannot know compassion, from whom compassion has been taken. He cannot know love, with love denied him. But he will know pain, when pain is all that is given him.’ Compassion. Love. It was not civilization that birthed these gentle gifts – though its followers might claim otherwise. Nor was civilization the sweetest garden for such things to blossom in – though those trapped within it might imagine it so. No, as far as he could see, civilization was a madman’s mechanism that, for all its good intentions, ended up ensnaring the gentle gifts, stifling them, leaving them to wander mazes only to die alone and in the dark. A mechanism, a cagework, and in its chaos the slaves bred like flies – until the world itself groaned under the assault of their appetites.