Ranking the Black Company novels

I'm way behind on using this blog to mindlessly recite all the books I've been reading. In fact, this time I'm so far behind that I'm not going to use just one post to that end. So this post will only cover the remaining Black Company compilations that I read, which were the "Books of Glittering Stone" in the Black Company series. I read these in two compilations, each with two books. For some terrible reason, the KCLS doesn't seem to have the first of those, The Return of the Black Company. So I had to get it on interlibrary loan from Portland. Covington did have the last book, The Many Deaths of the Black Company readily available.

I read this series in four volumes, but really, there are ten books as written and as originally published. For no good reason, I will now rank them from best to worst...

1. Dreams of Steel
2. The White Rose
3. The Black Company
4. Soldiers Live
5. Water Sleeps
6. Shadows Linger
7. Bleak Seasons
8. The Silver Spike
9. She is the Darkness
10. Shadow Games

Well, now I've satisfied my urge to rank those books. It's not particularly useful, since the later ones build off the earlier ones anyway, and all of the ones I ranked lower actually have some really cool aspects, but are just deemed, by me, to be more flawed. I'd comment more on the merits of the series as a whole, but this post just ended.