As I stood thus looking about, a bull voice broke in a roar.
“A damned apim! Well, apim, and what kept you?”
Lying back on a spread cloak of black and yellow lozenges a numim bellowed at me. The lion-man’s head was wrapped in a clumsy bandage ripped from the hem of the cloak, and the black and yellow interweavings, like the hide of a sanjit, were stained with blood. In his right fist he gripped a sword whose blade had snapped off a foot from the hilt. He looked to be in the most ferocious of bad tempers. His hide was so dark a brown as to appear black, and his bristling lion mane was a tawny umber. He was not of the golden numims.
“By Numi-Hyrjiv the Golden Splendor! You’ve been lollygagging around, and here I lie waiting for you! This is not to be born. And have the Everoinye then sunk
