II:

Martin sat on a bench in the Great Marketplace, like a rock in a stream, as the crowd flowed around him on both side. For all that, he was blind to the multitude of people of milling around him, and to the merchants beneath their bright awnings.

Martin's eyes were fixed upon the Clock.

Like most watchmakers, Martin had made a study of the Terelandrian Clock in its many forms, which was surely the pinnacle of his craft. Though he could not hope to duplicate the magic that made it run eternally -- much less the subtle sorcery of the Spans -- the ordinary motions of the Clock were mechanical in nature, driven by springs or hanging weights and pendulums, and it was eternally precise, never requiring adjustment.

In theory then, Martin thought that it ought to be possible to replicate the inner workings of the clock to produce a mundane clock just as precise, though of course it would need to be wound now and then, and probably reset once or twice a year.

The problem was that it wasn't possible.

Since watchmakers and other masters of clock work had first begun adapting the workings of the Clock in miniature --based on their study of the mechanical parts of the clock, which could be easily viewed from inside a Clock tower -- they had noticed that their own timepieces, no matter how well crafted during the Span of Making, were simply never as accurate.

They always lost time, and lost it quickly enough that if you wanted to keep your clock precisely synchronized with the Terelandrian Clock -- which almost everyone did -- you had to reset it constantly.

Most people had no reason for such great specificity, and were content to reset theirs every few days. But there were some who kept more precise schedules, like those whose business was trade or travel. Such people still marked the arbitrary "hours" and "minutes" that had been used to divide up the day before the Clock was introduced, watching each minute as a miser watches each penny, and so they set their watches anew each morning, by the nearest Terelandrian Clock.

Most watchmakers had accepted this as a natural limitation of their craft, presuming that some spell or enchantment was what kept the Terelandrian Clock from losing time, and that this precision simply could not be replicated with mere springs and counterweights.

But Martin did not accept this. Though the Clock had magical springs that never wore out, and enchanted gears that never seized, it seemed to Martin that these merely prevented it from breaking -- the magic did not appear to change the fundamental nature of the parts, or of the materials they'd been made from. Perhaps you could not make a mundane clock that was correct forever, due to its components eventually wearing out, but he saw no good explanation for why such a clock couldn't keep time for more than a day.

Or at least he hadn't before.

It had happened by accident, on a day when his passion for unravelling the mechanical secrets of the Clock had been running especially high, and he'd decided to remain in his workshop during the Span of Wealth, instead of taking his stock to the Great Marketplace to sell, as usual.

He had two newly made watches, that he'd set by the Terelandrian Clock only an hour before, and both were as precise a work as he'd ever constructed. Both were set on his workbench while he worked on a third of the same type, hoping that by observing the workings of identical pieces, he could deduce something about the problem that made them lose time so readily.

He worked all the way through the Span of Wealth, until, as it always did, that Span ended, and gave way to the momentary Span of Renewal. As the two watches ticked down to the end of the Span, he lifted his tools from the delicate clockwork, so the Span of Renewal would not take him unaware while he was making a fine adjustment. The disorienting fugue rolled over him like a wave, and was just as quickly gone, as the Span of Making began.

He had been just about to go back to work when he noticed it: in the space of a eyeblink, both of the newly set timepieces had advanced by a minute.

By exactly one minute.