Need to seize a country? Have enemies you must destroy? In this handbook for despots and tyrants, the Renaissance statesman Machiavelli sets forth how to accomplish this and more, while avoiding the awkwardness of becoming generally hated and despised. "Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be...

While armies of the Shadowrealms gather and Machiavelli goes to Alcatraz to kill Perenelle Flamel, fifteen-year-old twins Sophie and Josh Newman accompany the Alchemyst to England to seek Gilgamesh.