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The fight at the end of TPOD raises many questions. Who was behind the attack? What was the true goal of the attack? What was Dashiva doing there? As one might expect, there isn't total agreement on these questions. We'll go over the facts of what happened, and then we will present various theories and ideas about what was going on.
The scene under discussion occurs in [TPOD: 29, A Cup of Sleep, 558-573]. Min, Rand, and Fedwin Morr are in Rand's apartment in the Cairhien Palace. Sorilea drags the re-educated Aes Sedai in to swear fealty to Rand. Sorilea then tells him that Cadsuane is in the palace, and goads him into seeking her out. Sorilea and the AS leave. Rand, Min, and Morr leave Rand's rooms to find Cadsuane. When they've gone down the hall a bit, the apartments are smashed with the OP. We know that Rand et al are a little ways down from the rooms, because they survive with minor injuries, while the Maidens who were guarding the doors are killed. Rand charges Morr with taking Min to safety and guarding her, then sets out to track down his attackers.
Rand skulks around for a while, seeking the male channelers who blew up his rooms (he thinks it might have been Demandred or Asmodean). He thinks that the attackers must have spies in the palace, since they must have known he was in his rooms (or had been) at the time of the attack. A couple of Sea Folk women see him, and he ties them up, shielding the Windfinder. He worries that somebody could have detected the quantity of OP used to do that shielding.
Just after the Windfinder's quarters, Rand comes to a set of stairs which lead down into a hall of some sort. He sees Dashiva, Gedwyn, and Rochaid in the hall. Gedwyn says, "I felt nothing. He's dead!" Dashiva spies Rand at the top of the stairs, snarls, and shoots some bolt-o-nastiness at Rand. Rand channels a super-shield around himself. Dashiva's bolt knocks him back down the corridor, and the bits of it which bounce off the shield do a number on the hallway. Rand sends his own nasty thing towards where he'd seen the three men. Then, he runs back up the hallway, and takes an alternate route down to the room where he'd seen the men. It is clear to him that they'd escaped. Rand scares some servants, and then feels a man channel "enough of the Power to make a gateway." Rand wanders around in a killing rage for a while longer, almost toasting Narishma and Flinn. He searches the palace for hours, and doesn't find Dashiva, Rochaid, and Gedwyn.
Finally, he finds Min in the company of a now-mad Morr. An odd thing worth noting is that the Laurel Crown and Dragon Scepter made it through the attack unscathed, while the Dragon Throne (which they were sitting on) was reduced to splinters. Taim arrives, claiming to have come to report deserters: Gedwyn, Rochaid, Torval, and Kisman. Rand puts Morr down, and tells Taim to add Dashiva to the list of deserters. Taim is clearly angered and surprised to learn about Dashiva. Taim leaves, and Rand tells Min that he's planning to go on the lam. Min declares that she'll go with him.
Disclaimer: Here's how the scene appears, when taken at face value: Gedwyn, Rochaid, and Dashiva deserted from the BT, and decided to make a statement by trying to kill Rand. After blowing up his apartment, they found out that Rand was still alive. Dashiva took a shot at Rand, but Gedwyn and Rochaid chickened out, and ran off. Later, Taim discovered Gedwyn and Rochaid's desertion (and Torval's and Kisman's), and was shocked and amazed. He Traveled to Cairhien to report it to Rand immediately, and was shocked and amazed to discover that Dashiva, too, had deserted. If that's all that happened, then there is nothing more to discuss. The following ideas are reasonable conclusions to draw, if we assume that everything was not exactly as it appeared in the scene.
The following discussion attempts to stick with the facts of the matter, as depicted in the books. To keep things simple, nothing is being assumed about the possible secret identities of Taim and Dashiva. That is, we will only discuss things which can be concluded directly from Taim and Dashiva's actions, and which don't depend on them being Demandred (or not) and Osan'gar (or not). (However, the general idea that Taim and/or the attackers are working for the Shadow is considered.) The reader is invited to consider, for her or his own personal edification, what these ideas imply for the Taimandred and Dashivan'gar theories.
Two of the attackers, Gedwyn and Rochaid, were on Taim's list of "deserters." Now, note that these four deserters (those two, plus Torval and Kisman) seem to have been Taim's favorites among the Asha'man. Torval and Rochaid are the two Asha'man Taim recommends to Rand in place of Dashiva [ACOS: 2, The Butcher's Yard, 84]. The four deserters are the four men Taim calls for when he prepares to depart after Rand rejects Torval and Rochaid. During TPOD, we find that Taim has "created new ranks." Gedwyn and Rochaid are the "Storm Leader" and "Attack Leader"; they are the commander and second-in-command of the Asha'man on the Seanchan campaign. Gedwyn and Rochaid kill the assassin in [TPOD: 22, Gathering Clouds, 428-430], who is found with a large quantity of Tar Valon coin. Rochaid tries to convince Rand that Aes Sedai were behind the attack. The whole scene smells bad-- it's more like Gedwyn and Rochaid set the archer up, so that Rand would think that AS were trying to kill him. Taim has, on many occasions, worked to drive a wedge between Rand and the AS. In any case, the four "deserters" reported by Taim were his right-hand men, the ones with the least reason to leave the BT.
Now, it just seems too much of a coincidence that Taim showed up in Cairhien to tell Rand about the "desertion" just a few hours after two of those deserters blew up the palace in a spectacular fashion. Not only did he discover their desertion awfully quickly, he knew the reason for their desertion: "they were malcontented over events in Altara." Did they give a speech before leaving? March into Taim's office and tender their resignations? Furthermore, Taim seems very calm and collected over the desertion of his four most-trusted men. This isn't very characteristic for a man who has so carefully created his own cult of personality.
It's much more likely that the whole "desertion" and attack were arranged by Taim. It's clear that he chafes under the restrictions Rand has placed on him. It's also clear that Rand doesn't trust him at all, and that if Taim had simply reported that his four had deserted, Rand probably would not have believed him. However, after the attack, Rand doesn't even question Taim's word. Note that the desertion and attack, if organized by Taim, have produced a group of male channelers who are loyal to Taim, not to Rand, and whose actions Taim can disavow. This is just too much of a good deal for Taim for it not to be the case. Note the difference between Taim's calm reaction to the desertion of his four favorites, and his anger at learning that Dashiva (who Taim did not like) had joined the four. He's more upset at Dashiva's interference than at the desertion of his four most trusted followers. That doesn't make sense, unless Taim engineered the desertion in the first place.
Rand, of course, assumes that the attack on his rooms was an attempt to kill him. However, it's very likely that the real goal of the attackers was something entirely different. Taken at face value, the attack was not orchestrated very well. Blowing up Rand's rooms caused only minor damage to Rand himself, since he was walking away from them when it happened. When Rand comes upon Rochaid, Gedwyn, and Dashiva in the hall, they have a perfect opportunity to gang up on him and finish him off. The only one who attacks Rand is Dashiva, and that only happens once. The three just ran away after that. If they were really out to kill Rand, they didn't seem to put much effort into it.
While Dashiva has a few screws loose, Gedwyn and Rochaid have shown themselves to be fairly competent at OP combat, plotting, and scheming. Taim certainly believed they were competent enough to promote them above the other Asha'man. This lame assassination attempt couldn't have come from the same careful plotters who set up the archer "assassin" in Illian. Surely the commanders of the Asha'man would know how to plan a strategy for hunting Rand down and killing him, when they had the advantage of three-to-one odds. Note that while Rochaid and Gedwyn are not nearly as strong as Rand, not even as strong as Flinn and Narishma [TPOD: 22, Gathering Clouds, 429], Dashiva is very strong (See section 1.2.2). The three of them should have been able to kill Rand, if they'd all been out to do so.
As Rand comes upon the three in [TPOD: 29, A Cup of Sleep, 568], Gedwyn is overheard saying, "[I'm] telling you I felt nothing. He's dead!" Presumably, this is in reference to Rand. This sentence can be taken two ways. One is that the three guys were trying to kill Rand, and Gedwyn thinks that the explosion in Rand's rooms did the job. The problem with this is that Gedwyn is a pretty competent guy, and if his goal was to kill Rand, he probably wouldn't blow up a few rooms and then leave, without getting confirmation that his target was indeed dead. The other way Gedwyn's words can be taken is that one member of the party (probably Dashiva-- Gedwyn and Rochaid seem to be joined at the hip) thought that the goal was to kill Rand when it really was not. Gedwyn was trying to convince that person that Rand was already dead, so that that person wouldn't go and try to kill him.
It has been suggested that the attackers were working under the auspices of the Shadow, and the true goal of the attack (or one of the goals) was to kill Min, not Rand. What motive would the Shadow have for killing Min? Paul Khangure proposes two motives: 1) Her death would affect Rand in many possible ways, none of them good. 2)She's been studying Herid Fel's work. She could be on the brink of discovering the same thing which Herid Fel discovered. It got Herid killed, why not Min also?" Apart from motive, there isn't much evidence to support this idea. It has a similar problem to the idea that the attackers were really trying to kill Rand-- apart from the initial attack, nobody tried to kill her. With three attackers, two could have kept Rand busy while the third finished Min off, but the only danger Min faced during the whole episode came from her "protector," the cracked Fedwin Morr.
Now, Dashiva, at least, took a direct, and very lethal-looking shot at Rand, right after Gedwyn said he thought Rand was dead. That piece of channeling was strong enough to knock Rand, in his impervious shield, all the way down the corridor, and to destroy a good bit of the corridor itself: "The fire that leaped from Dashiva erupted, shattering marble..." The aftermath of the blast is described: "the crash of explosions still ringing in the air, dust still hanging and bits of broken marble tumbling." Whatever Dashiva shot at Rand, it was nothing trivial. Since Rand's super-shield was dredged up out of LTT-memory at that very instant, there was no way Dashiva could have known that Rand would block it. The reasonable conclusion is that Dashiva, at least, was really trying to kill Rand. Perhaps he thought better of it right afterwards, or perhaps Gedwyn and Rochaid convinced him to leave some other way, but it seems that all three must have left the area shortly after Dashiva shot at Rand. After Rand feels "enough of the Power to make a gateway" being channeled, there is no more sign of the three attackers in the Palace. That channeling must have been them channeling to leave. This brings us to our last point of discussion:
At the start of the attack, Rand notes "A man, Demandred, or perhaps Asmodean come back at last. Maybe both; there had been an oddity, as if the weaving came from different directions." Rand thinks the "different directions" possibly came from two attackers. It isn't unreasonable to suppose that this is the case, since there are indeed multiple attackers, and, being men, they can't link together to form a single weave. So, let us suppose that the initial attack was launched by two men. The third one joined after the attack had begun. The most reasonable scenario is that Gedwyn and Rochaid Traveled from the BT to Cairhien and made the first attack on Rand's apartments. Dashiva was part of Rand's entourage, and Taim didn't like him, anyway, so there isn't any reason to suppose that Dashiva was at the BT and hooked up with Gedwyn and Rochaid there. More likely, he was in Cairhien like the rest of Rand's Asha'man (Morr, Flinn, and Narishma), and joined Gedwyn and Rochaid after the attack was in progress. The facts 1) that he's the only one of the three to take a direct shot at Rand, and 2) Taim was inordinately upset at the news of his desertion support the idea of Dashiva as "odd man out" among the three attackers. So, the general idea is that Dashiva joined in unexpectedly, and either didn't understand that the goal was not to kill Rand, or took advantage of the situation to launch his own attack on Rand.
[Bryon Wasserman]
Taim had the fearsome foursome (Gedwyn, Rochaid, Torval, Kisman) attack Rand and Min for the purpose of causing a formal split within the Asha'man and/or killing Min. Dashiva latched on after the fact, not knowing that they were not supposed to kill Rand . You will notice that that Dashiva is the only one who attacks Rand directly. This answers the following concerns:
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