They ran out? Also, the good guys are too powerful and well guarded for them to be very effective. They did not know where Perrin and Mat were when Moridin ordered them killed, so they couldn't really send Gray Men after them - the assassination attempts were opportunistic. Rand has been hands-off for a while, Nynaeve has been lying low, and Egwene has been serving their purposes, so there has been no need to take them out.


She has spies in Illian, such as the innkeeper. In cities of that era, people could spend their entire lives in a single neighborhood, especially if they had a business to run on a daily basis (including holidays, which we see are even busier for inns) that precluded long trips. To assume that a single innkeeper was capable of watching the whole city for Moiraine is absurd. If she had an interest in Illian (a city important to the end times, with its connection to the Horn of Valere), she had much more highly placed spies. The clues are not hard to figure out if you know what to look for, and as fionwe1987 notes, she could easily have read a surviving description of Sammael.

We see she has sources in odd places, like her connections with Vandene and Adeleas. And she's had 20 years of poking in weird places and sources. 20 years of knowing the Apocalypse will happen in your natural lifetime is a lot of incentive to power up.

Or the Pattern prepping her to be of use to Rand.

Bel'al & Samon. Slip of the tongue by Darkfriend minions? She does have that near-Compulsion trick she used on the woman who tried to drug her in New Spring - interrogating a Darkfriend would be easy.


Asmodean is really quite simple - as you say, she never refers to him by name, so there is no proof she even knew who he was. Knowing he was a Forsaken should be obvious - she eavesdropped on his teaching sessions with Rand! Egwene CATCHES HER doing that. Recall the night after she & Nynaeve discover Siuan's overthrow. She goes by Rand's tent and peeks in to see him arguing with "Natael" in a private lesson where they had wanted Aviendha out of the tent. From his tent, she goes to Moiraine and finds her using her eavesropping stone. She challenges Moiraine claiming that Moiraine had said she would not spy on Rand anymore, and Moiraine replies that she only refused because the Wise Ones were already spying on his dreams. Once he blocked them out, she went back to doing spying. He learned to shield the Wise Ones out of his dreams from Asmodean. No doubt an additional motive for her resuming her spying is her suspicion of his suddenly aquisition of a new, non-intuitive skill. In any case, even if they never mentioned his true name, even if Asmodean never slipped up again and referred to "the Great Lord," the nature and context of their conversations would blatantly expose his origin.