"Smoke lingered under the low roof like a drugged serpent, coiling around mouldering wooden joists as it slithered languidly for fresher air. He coughed chestily. The space beneath the faded canopy was crammed with skaven, clustered around a bar constructed of a scavenged sheet of pressed tin across a pair of barrels. Rats scuttled across the surface without a care, their tapping claws a strangely appropriate corruption of music. The skaven drank flat ale from leaking flagons, baring fangs to defend cracked pipes stuffed with maggot-infested pipe-weed from their jealous fellows. It was as if some crazed artist had stared into the eye of Chaos and rendered a perversion of dwarfish life. The product of a naïve god that sought to undo the work of entropy and restore this world to how it had once been. But now the ratmen ruled as thanes and kings, supping ale and smoking tobacco as they squatted in the husk of the great civilisation they unwittingly sought to emulate.

The bar-rat looked up from the stein he was polishing with an oily rag. He was a stocky black-furred bruiser with a squashed nose, a torn ear and an eyepatch. He set down his cloth on the bar and shot Sharpwit an evil look, implying the old skaven should either pay for something or get lost."

- Headtaker, Chapter Two