Lilo seems to depend on nasm, but the ebuild doesn't say anything about that. I tried to emerge lilo on a brand spanking new system and it nearly finished, but then failed because the nasm command wasn't there. I added "nasm" to the DEPEND variable in the ebuild and it fixed it, though I don't know whether lilo depends on a certain version of nasm.
(from lilo.lsm in the lilo package) Platforms: Linux 0.99pl12 or newer, gcc, nasm (0.98), and as86 (v.16) needed to compile. LaTeX and (optionally) Perl and Transfig needed to print the documentation.
fixed.