Deciding that a slow ride through the back country is safer, the posse gets on their horses for the trip to New Orleans, which takes them a week and a half, wandering along narrow roads and trails past plantations and swamps along the Pearl River. Along the way they occasionally find a town with a newspaper, and learn that the South has used choking chemical weapons to repel the North at Mannasses, that Confederate ornithopters have repelled the Union air carriages, and that Sherman is marching through Kentucky, burning and destroying as he goes.

Elder Tanner is also plagued by dreams on the trip. In some dreams, he is sheltering from a storm in a welcoming house, or under a pine. In others, he is remembering the time with Grimme, eating bowl after bowl of stew, telling Grimme everything in a breathless way... quite horrid. The consensus of the posse is that the incident with Grimme was the worst betrayal of his life, and the gun is making him remember it. Robert is skeptical however, since it wasn't at all a conscious betrayal - Joseph though he was doing the right thing.

Passing into Louisiana, they learn from a paper that Davis has won the Confederate elections, and that Lee has published a personal appeal to his supporters to settle down and accept the result. Davis, interestingly, took all of the new frontier states, but few of the established eastern states. Sherman has been repulsed from Bowling Green in Kentucky, and the British have strangely crossed from Canada and taken Detroit! In the North, Grant won the election, defeating Tilden easily.

Finally they arrive in New Orleans, taking rooms at the Red Cat Hotel north of the French Quarter. They spend a day checking out the town, and manage to learn about a new silver smith who set up shop a few months ago but was burned out only a couple of weeks ago. They surmise that this may be Nicodemus, burned out by the Rangers, but there's no hard evidence. A nearby bar owner remembers the man as short and round, which matches their quarry.

On Sunday Vorpwhistle, Tobey, and Cady head to the Cathedral to hear mass, but get sidetracked by a voodoun ceremony in Congo Square along the way. Vorpwhistle insists on watching. This is merely a preparatory ceremony - the big one will happen after night falls. They go to noon mass, and then nap.

Thaddeus of course insists on seeing the full ceremony. Tobey decides not to go to something that might awaken her evil spirit. Cady of course wants to go, and Robert reluctantly goes along to try to keep them out of trouble (with, as it turns out, little success). The ceremony involves a lot of drumming and dancing, as well as dirty looks from the almost exclusively black congregation at the lily-white (recently bathed, even) observers.

The ceremony is led by Marie Laveau, a black woman of indeterminate age. She first invokes the loa Legba, to open the ways, and a young woman among the dancers begins to act like an old man, and speak in Legba's voice. Then together with Legba she invokes Baron Samedi, a loa of death. After a tall man is ridden by the Baron, he sits and begins to take the questions of petitioners, who are asking after their sons, daughters, friends... the Baron answers each with confidence and often a dark joke, telling them whether the person has passed on into death or not.

At this point, Cady and Vorpwhistle go to get in line, despite Robert's efforts to the contrary. They are blocked by some of the congregants, but just before it degenerates to blows, Legba intervenes. The young woman's thin arm effortlessly holds back the strong arm of a man about to teach Vorpwhistle something about cross-cultural politeness. Legba says that these visitors are to be allowed to talk to the Baron, and there is no more argument.

Cady asks the Baron about her brother, and whether he is suffering in the afterlife. The Baron asks her what she thinks... and tells her that until she learns the right questions to ask, she won't get the right answers. Vorpwhistle asks a question about what happens to people after they die, and the Baron tells him that he cannot say. If he said something good, everyone would want to die. If he said it was terrible, people's fear of death would grow. Finally, he takes a cockroach in his hand and crushes it. What does the cockroach think happened?

On their way to leave, they are confronted by Marie, who wants to know why the loa talked to them. Before she can really rip into them, Legba arrives again, and she is cowed. After confessing their purpose in the city, they learn from the priestess and the loa that the powerful sorcerer they seek was in fact burned out and fled. To the west, says Legba.

Returning to their hotel, they are deprived of restful sleep when huge men break down their doors a few hours later. These men are truly immense (and not, it turns out, actually human). In the hallway are some actual people and some sort of witch doctor man, waiting for the posse to be subdued. The posse, of course, doesn't want to be subdued. Tobey is a whirlwind of death, beheading one of the huge men, springing into the hallway, being caught up by another in a crushing grip, from which she not only beheads him (using her hair-tentacle to wield the machete) but also flings her machete at the witch doctor and takes his hand off.

In the other room, things don't go so well - the bed is flung at the men, and the EKG malfunctions. Finally the big creature catches Elder Tanner, but he is so protected by the armor of god that it can't hurt him, like a child struggling with a walnut. Robert shoots in in the head as it tries.

In the end, they are left with the de-handed witch doctor and a man that Robert has shot in the stomach, as well as another man who knocked himself out trying to flee. Questioning the sorcerer doesn't reveal much - he won't say who sent him, if anyone did, and he's completely intimidated by what he ran into. Finally he breaks a little and reveals that he wants to know why the loa talked to them.

Robert gets pretty angry - why didn't he just ask them? And they have no idea anyway, and this is no reason to get people killed... he goes on for a while. In the middle of his rage, the witch doctor finally passes out from blood loss. Robert and Joseph go out to look for a doctor to care for this man, whose injury is beyond their mundane skills (and neither are willing to invoke blessings to fix it) while the rest of the posse waits expecting the police to arrive soon.