" I can do nothing. The knowledge was a whisper of madness. The assassin feared but one thing that left him skeined with terror: helplessness. But not the helplessness of being a prisoner, or of undergoing torture – he’d been victim to both, and he well knew that torture could break anyone – anyone at all. But this . . . Kalam feared insignificance, he feared the inability to produce an effect, to force a change upon the world beyond his flesh. It was this knowledge that the scene before him was searing into his soul. "

― Steven Erikson , Deadhouse Gates (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #2)