Disclaimer: Tortall is Tamora Pierce's, not mine, and just now I don't have the boredom to try to make a joke out of a disclaimer. . . .
No, I'm not going to tell you who it is until the end. You can probably guess, though. . . .
It was hot in the workroom— his sweat had already soaked the thin shirt he was wearing and the weight of the heat was making him just a little drowsy. The climate of Carthak was bad enough, and it was just intensified by the fire he had to work over.
The luminous liquid over the flames was just about ready— all it needed was knowledge of its destination. Three months of preparation had finally reached it's climax. The man leaned over it, sending his thoughts and will into the substance. City streets, palace corridors, not this land but that of the sorcerer's own. He poured his memory of the place into the liquid. His only reply was the slow bubbling at it's slow boil.
At least in a physical sense, it was. He felt the magic that radiated from it, too, and it was the sense of magic that responded to his will, sinking deeper into power and farther into the ethereal. Was that supposed to happen? His memory wavered from the city for a moment, trying to recall numerous dusty spellbooks from which he'd retrieved the potion's ingredients.
The magic started to bleed into the physical world— the man had to pause and catch it, deciding that what was happening was indeed proper and sending it back into the ethereal, perhaps a place between mortal and divine.
The memories came faster and more specific now— various shops, inns, and streets of the city and rooms and hallways of the palace. Hand while he hesitated for a bare moment, questioning himself for the first time in the project, he poured faces into it too, one after another of those he remembered from this place, letting the essence of its intended setting sink into the potion. Again the magic seemed to work its strange ways, and still all the physical potion did was produce it's slow bubbles in the thick liquid.
Finally, the sorcerer's memories were growing thin; there wasn't much more he could give the spell of it's destination, and therefore, he had to send it then.
Muttering in a spell that had probably been written in a language once, but was now only fragmented, Roger of Conté sent his plague to Corus.
373 words— that's got to be one of the shortest short stories I've ever written. . . . . Anyway, as far as relevance is concerned I sort of wondered what the casting of that spell might have been like. So I wrote it, on what I know about Tortall's magic— will dominated. I invite opinions, and wish you would review! Cheers! — Loki